Every three months … .

Yeah, remember? http://5-rings.com/blog/2009/09/every-three-months/

Shall we try this again?

Let’s make it nice and easy.

Ten days isn’t a lot of time to get prepared. A lot of you might be coming off a NaNoWriMo crash, hoping for a little R & R.

I know I’m exhausted from the rollercoaster ride I’ve been on….

So the new rules (and I use that term loosely) are as follows:

THE BASICS: Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the finish line—You’ve made it!

Without further ado, the final statistics:

1.

Joseph Lewis:

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Just two words today.

The & End.

^__^

Yes, the ‘End of the Book’ I’ve been craving since the beginning is upon us!

It feels so good to be done. I’ve been working on this thing since … September 2007.

But it’s just a first draft. To be honest, you couldn’t pay me to show this fuzzy-logic, missing-scene-ridden, poor dialogue version to anybody. I guess that’s what a revision is for, right? :)

I have the option to start a new project for NPI and continue on for the next 6 days, or to stop here. I think at this point I’m going to stop here, keep my mind focused on Five Rings, & read a few books on how to properly tackle a first revision.

I’ll post the final word count when I get Total Assistant working (my free trial expired).

Yo, yo, yo peeps. Not only is it FRIDAY, (yeah, it’s freaking Friday, party people!) but you’ve managed click on another wondrous (read: long-winded) pseudo-weekly progress report of the Novel-Push Initiative.

N

P

I

YEAH BABY!!! Read the rest of this entry »

THE BASICS:

• Event will run from May 1st-31st.
• Simply write 350+ words per day!
• To discourage project-jumping, please pick only one project for this event (preferably something novella/novel-sized).
• You’ll need to publish your daily word counts every day by midnight using a blog of some kind; something that I can check against a time-stamp (Even a Twitter account will do).

               The simplest Tweet can look like this:

               350 words.
               11:59 PM May 1st from web.

• Of course, you’ll want to double-check your local settings to make sure it matches your time zone.

ADDITIONAL RULES:

• You are allowed to project-jump if and only if you finish your manuscript during the event.
• If you’d like to participate but haven’t signed up yet, you’ll need to reply to this or any of my blog posts before May 1st, stating what project you’d like to work on and a link to the blog you wish to use for the event. Alternatively, you are also welcome to contact me.
• You can be as detailed as you want with your posts. The simplest post can just be a word count, but you’re welcome to keep track of your total word count, talk about what you’ve been writing, and maybe even share a snippet or two—if you’re feeling generous.
• Since we’re upping the ante from 250 to 350 words per day, and I’d like to see everyone make it to May 31st,  I am allowing one day of reprieve. Hopefully, this will go a long way to prevent burn-out/serve as padding in the event of an emergency.
• NaNoWriMo famously averages out to 1,667 words per day. So here’s the revised break-down:

1. A “Knock-out” is 0-349 words.
2. An “Update” is 350-999 words.
3. A  “Session” is 1,000-1,667 words.
4. A “Tougher-than-NaNo” is anything greater than 1,667.
5. An “End of the Book” is when you’ve completed your MIP and type ‘THE END’.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?:

• At the very minimum, if you keep up, you’ll end up with 10,850 words added to your work-in-progress. This is a great kick-in-the-butt for us procrastinators!
• I think you’ll find NPI is surprisingly uplifting and friendly—everybody participating (and the people watching from the sidelines) tend to be extremely supportive. Which leads me to…
• You’ll meet lots of new friends! :D
• I will periodically link to each of your sites and post your word-tallies up to a “Knock-out”.

So, still with me? Great! Again, I advise you to take no prisoners as you march your plots ever forward, towards—and beyond—May 31st. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

WC: 512.

It’s been a wonderful, fruitful month… I’m soo much closer to the End of the Book now—The story is so much clearer on the page and in my mind than it has ever been before—And I’m much, much closer to finally scaling that un-scalable mountain I’ve been blogging about ever since my very first post.

I bet if I hadn’t had the gall to run this event and the stubborn-ness to stick with it to the end of March, I’d still be at least 10,000 words ago. I bet if I hadn’t had the audacity to start blogging about writing, I’d still be stuck way back on a rudimentary version of chapter 5. Cirellio would probably still be stuck in the middle of the Shiirati Desert, wondering what the heck to do next. Now … it all seems like so long ago. I bet if I didn’t have the support of all the great people that visit this site, I wouldn’t be feeling too good about my writing; I might’ve called it quits by now. This whole experience has been magical for me, so thank you!!!!!!!!!

Tomorrow marks the final day of the Novel Push Initiative. And the final word count. Get that wine ready!

;)

I think I found a great way to smoke out those unsightly plot-holes and other plot uncertainties.

((This is obviously just another way to keep track of plot-threads, but I thought I’d share this technique in case it works for you better than the more traditional plot-thread management techniques (colored index cards, spreadsheets, etc).)) Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time since I was fifteen years old, I had written something!!! It had been thirteen long years, and it felt good to be back.

Reading authoritative books from cover-to-cover on stuff like writing and technique was really just a way of convincing myself I was serious about learning to write a novel. Yet, as I moved on, those very books were becoming more and more obsolete. They found themselves being pushed farther and farther away until they were clearly out of arm’s reach. In their place? Lots of novels.

After all was said and done, I felt they had served their purpose well:

1. They made published writers seem far more ‘human’ to me; their world more accessible.

2. Information on finding agents and publishers: very interesting! It would have taken me ages to learn all that stuff on my own. For example, I would have still not heard of the Writer’s Market.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you may recall, I knew that I wanted to write a high fantasy story about an anti-hero, a thief named Cirellio. And that’s about it.

So … where did I get ‘Cirellio’ in the first place?

Cirellio’s humble beginnings:
2:00 AM. In a cold basement. With friends of the more … geeky persuasion. All of us were wired on Mountain Dew, and we were crowded around coffee tables, seated in old folding chairs, only a little worried we would get too noisy and wake up J.J.’s mom. I needed to name the thief I had just rolled, and I was always picky about decisions like that. With everyone else impatiently waiting to get started, I had grown desperate enough to start rummaging through a pile of nearby Magic: The Gathering cards as a possible source for inspiration. An artist’s name caught my eye: CIRUELO. Derived from that name, the word ‘cirellio’ just … sounded like my rogue (pronounced - Sir-el-ee-oh).

So yeah … Cirellio was a thief I created for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I would love to tell you I created Cirellio out of thin air instead of on a character creation sheet, but, this, my friends, is truth. Poor Cirellio died that same night to a nasty spell called Melf’s Acid Arrow. But no matter what his humble beginnings were, I fell in love with his name and the persona I developed for him, which incubated over the following years in my mind (even though I wasn’t playing AD&D any more). He was my all-time favorite character, so I reclaimed him from the grave for this book.

Armed with only a name and profession, it seemed the only way for me to progress was to just swallow my pride and start writing. After all, I had nothing to lose, and if I didn’t ever write my stories, who would?

Getting ready to knock on my muse’s door for the first time in years was hard. My heart felt like it going to leap right out of my chest. Would my muse turn me away? I took a deep breath and created a text file simply called ‘book.txt’. A double-click later and I was staring at a blank white landscape which, with persistence, would soon be filled with my imagination.

Hmm … a blank, white landscape?

With that thought, I closed my eyes and visualized. I didn’t worry about deleting. I just let it flow, letting the keyboard mine the depths of my imagination. When the trance-like flow finally ended, I found I had written a total of 3,253 words! I had chills.

Later, I would find out this wonderful technique was something already well known in the writing world … called ‘freewriting’.

The opening paragraph of my freewrite looked like this:

Read the rest of this entry »

I am currently in the middle of writing a book. Or ‘middling’ - as it is sometimes called in the writing world. This is the point of the book writing process where you see a nightmarish landscape of jagged, foreboding mountains laid out before you during a swirling storm, and you must traverse all of it if you ever wish to see, somewhere on the horizon, the fabled, glimmering, heavenly, yet taunting, End of the Book. This is the point where you realise you will indeed pay with your sweat, blood, and tears - just like all of those authors whose advice you read forewarned - before finally making it to the end of the story, only to be greeted by an unforgiving ‘final editing process ogre’ holding his stopwatch and tapping his massive foot, demanding even more of your time and patience.

Read the rest of this entry »