A little inspiration ...

Who doesn't need some every now and then?

A fresh start and a Nanowrimo reflection...

Now that Nanowrimo is finished and I'm getting serious about a new project, I thought it was time to give my writing desk a good cleaning. So here it is -- where I spend hours and hours (and hours and hours).

Looks relatively clean, doesn't it? Believe me, it won't last.

As I get involved in a new story, pictures will be printed out or cut out and posted on the cork board as the faces of characters I'm developing. I'll post notes about plot points I want to focus on, and details I don't want to forget.

Whatever doesn't fit on the board will go into the WIP notebook, which I try to keep organized, but always ends up being kind of a jumble. Even so, it still helps to keep all the notes together, otherwise I might find them tucked in with next year's tax documents, or the magazine pile, or who knows where.

I also always work with a notepad or sticky notes beside me so I can jot notes about chores and other non-writing-related things I need to remember for later -- but not during writing time.

So this is it. Welcome to my writing home...

Also, I said earlier that I'd share my post-Nanowrimo thoughts. So here they are, for whatever they're worth...

It was my first year, so I'm really just happy that I was able to log 50K words even thought I fudged and wrote two partial novels instead of a full one. It couldn't be helped, though. The second one had to get started, and there was no way I was going to be able to make a dent in it *and* write another 50K novel.

What I really liked about the whole endeavor, though, was the sheer pressure of writing so many words. By nature, I'm not what you'd call a fast writer. Writing roughly 2K words a day is far more than my norm. I'm a write-revise-revise-revise kind of writer. To keep up with the challenge, I really had to force myself to push forward. But since I couldn't stop every few paragraphs to think about how everything was going to fit with the outline, I went into uncharted territory quite a few times and it led to some great new material. It was actually really fun to stumble onto what will become some great scenes once I go back and work on them a bit more (now that I have time to write-revise-revise-revise!).

Overall, I think Nanowrimo is a great way to plunge into a first draft. I don't think I could ever punch out pages at that speed and be happy with the prose as an end result, though. But that's just me...