Category Archives: Writing

Short Post – NaNo is my main fandom

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I just had a random thought and I felt like sharing. I would never consider NaNo to be a fandom really, if I was saying what my main fandom was I would probably say “Once Upon a Time” because I participate in that fandom online BUT in terms of swag NaNo comes out way ahead of everything else.

I show my NaNo pride year round with my three framed posters on the wall. I also have a word count tracker up on my magnetic noticeboard which works year round. I have 2 coffee mugs but I don’t use either as the handle of one arrived cracked so it’s not safe, and the other isn’t dishwasher safe. So they are like ornaments on my table and I use them to hold stationary etc.

Those mugs might not be used for their true purpose but I have two NaNo thermos flasks which I use year round. One is brand new so I haven’t used it yet but I will! I have a cold weather beanie hat which I’ll use in the winter (also new), half a dozen winners shirts and the NaNo hoodie. I tend to only wear the NaNo clothes during November but I could wear them at other times.

That it? Nope! I have two NaNo books – No Plot? No Problem! and the 52 Pep Talks. I have a USB bracelet, and a regular rubber bracelet. I’ve got a ton of stickers and bookmarks. Basically, when it comes to swag – NaNo has it covered!

In contrast I have coffee mugs for other stuff and t-shirts but that’s pretty much it. I used to have sweaters but I don’t any longer. I do have some card collections and one cuddly toy but these items are split over multiple TV shows. Whereas NaNo is one thing and has so much!

So what’s the point of this post? I don’t know. It’s just that this is going to be my 11th year/10th November event, my 19th event if I count Camp’s. It’ll be 10th time getting 50k or over in a month (failure is not an option) and well – stuff accumulates over time. I have loved and participated in NaNo for more years than I’ve loved any particular TV show. NaNo is forever.

Yeah that’s basically it – NaNo is my forever fandom.

No plan survives first contact

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Otherwise known as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, or variations of that cliche. No matter what we plan, or intend, quite often things don’t work out that way. Life twists and turns in mysterious ways and nothing ever turns out as expected. I think I might have said that in a recent post, about how a year ago I would never guess I’d be sitting here. I think 2017 could be termed “the year of the unexpected” because basically since this time last year, nothing has been the same.

This time last year I was in a self-loathing pit because I’d had my first ever review on my published book. Admittedly it was pretty mean and dramatically written but reviews like that are par for the course. I thought I was prepared to deal with it and I wasn’t. So I couldn’t face continuing with Book Three, it knocked me for six, and I decided to work on something else until I stopped feeling like an abject failure.

My ‘plan‘ was to pick up Book Three in December, and I was still aiming to publish March/April at the latest. Well some life stuff happened, I could go into details but I don’t really like to do that on the internet (even though this is password protected) and besides it feels a little like I’m making excuses. Basically in many ways I checked out of life and didn’t really get my footing back until the summer, when I suddenly got the idea to change my life completely and go back to university.

Anyway, this post isn’t about what did happen – it’s about what didn’t happen.

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Reflections, Revelations and The Future

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Knowing and feeling are two different things. I think I’ve said that before but it bears repeating. In this post I’m going to talk about some realisations I’ve had but that doesn’t mean I won’t backslide. Sometimes lessons have to be learned more than once before they stick. I might ‘know‘ some things now but whether I have truly accepted them is still something of a question mark.

I’ve spoken before about “blogging resolutions”, and how I wanted to blog at least once a week, and feeling bad about it when I failed those resolutions. There are a lot of reasons why I didn’t stick to blogging more but the one I want to talk about today is that I simply didn’t care enough. My head had made it a priority as “something I was going to do” but deep down I just didn’t view it as important.

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Status Post – Year in Review

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I know it’s the 31st and this is very cliche but I didn’t blog around NaNo so I’m overdue one of these posts. In a post after Camp NaNo I said what I was intending for November, and it really didn’t work out that way and I was loathe to make a post, just to say how disappointed I was.

In 2016 I wrote 500k, or 500,180 words to be precise. Well, actually it’s not necessarily that accurate as I only started tracking properly in June but I’m reasonably certain I did half a million. That’s huge for me as it’s not that long ago that I only wrote in November and struggled to write much of anything the rest of the year. Since July I’ve done at least 50k a month, usually doing 60k+. The only slight fly in the ointment, is that it’s not been all original novels. A lot of it was fanfic, but again a lot of that fanfic can be turned original so it’s hardly wasted effort.

It’s also kept me going, kept me productive which is the biggest battle I usually face. I quite often get in spirals where I don’t do anything, I feel bad about that, and then I do even less. It’s given me a lot of ideas and so yeah generally in writing terms 2016 has been a damn good start. I’ve published two books, and a free short story/prequel. The couple of reviews I’ve had, aren’t great (well they are bad) but I’m still getting sales/borrows and I’ve had 3 people sign up to my mailing list. It’s a start and I always knew that this was going to be a long journey.

In 2017 I want to continue to average 60k+ a month. If I do that then 750k should be easily doable. In terms of projects I need to write Book Three of my Military Science Fantasy series. Before I do I need to decide whether I want to continue with Book Four straight away, or take a break and write something else, probably the related sci-fi series. I need to decide this before March as that’s when I have my next cover booked. I’m hoping to release Book Three by April at the latest. Ideally I would like to bring out something every 3-4 months but we’ll have to see how I get on.

I also want to work on my pen-name. I have the covers for three books, and I’ve half-written Book Two. I need to write all of them and decide on a strategy and what I’m doing with it marketing wise. I already know I’m going to have all three books finished and ready to go before I press publish on Book One, so I will have flexible options on what I do in terms of frequency. I might even wait and write more books, as it’s a pen-name and nobody is waiting for it, I can try and make a splash.

There’s fanfic, that isn’t a priority of course but I do have WIP’s that I want to finish, and then more stories that I want to write. I just love writing generally and I want to do a lot of it in 2017 and hopefully publish several books and maybe, just maybe, it’ll start to turn into something I might make money with. Money is after all what makes the world go round, and I could kinda do with some. That’s a bit mercenary I know but it would seriously improve my life and isn’t that a New Years goal everyone makes? For next year to be better.

Apart from writing, I want to get back to going to the gym regularly (even if lazy me disagrees) and hopefully that will mean I lose a bit of weight. Ultimately I just want to be fitter but being less fat would also be nice. I want to procrastinate less, so I can generally do more and not just productive stuff. If I actually got on with things, then I could spend my evenings watching TV or playing video games without guilt. I haven’t really played many video games this year and as backwards as it is, playing more is a goal for 2017. I enjoy it, so I should make time for it.

This is usually the point where I say that I would like to read more, but you know what, I totally give up on that one. I know that as an author that is totally backwards but I am so damn picky about what I read, plus books cost money (even more backwards seeing as I want people to buy mine) but I just can’t make it a priority right now.

So yeah that’s what happened that’s worthy of note (that isn’t really personal, as I don’t talk about that here) and a tentative plan for 2017. This year sucked for a lot of reasons but for me in terms of writing at least, it was a good start. Now I just need to build on it and try and do better, be better. Here’s to 2017!

August Retrospective

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I know I didn’t blog really last month, to be honest I didn’t really have anything to blog about. That will change when Once Upon a Time premieres on September 25th.

Although I nearly wrote a blogpost about Warcraft the other day. Legion has just launched and I was surprised at how completely I didn’t care. I thought I would feel a tug of nostalgia but I didn’t, which I guess means I’m completely over the game. If anything actually, I felt bad that I didn’t care. The game was a big part of my life for a few years, it’s still weird to just not care. I feel like I should but well it’s not the game I loved anymore.

Anyway, just a quick status post. I said at the end of my July retrospective what I was hoping to achieve in August – so did I complete my goal?

Yeah and then some. I finished the first draft of book two, which was the main goal. It’s run scarily short but I can fix that in revision – which I start today. All told last month I wrote 75k, my previous highest total for a month was 65k which I got in July. So I broke my record two months running.

My goal for September is to get as much revision done on book two as possible. Ideally I want it completed and sent to the editor by mid-october at the latest. Obviously, once the analysis/prep/planning part of the revision is over, there will be rewriting for the second draft. I also have other writing (fanfic) that I’m keeping busy with. So my word count goal for September is the same as last month – 50k.

I hope I exceed my goal again (that’s always fun) but if I don’t then it doesn’t matter. The main point is the revision and that will require as many words as it requires, no more or less. It’s less about words, more about getting it right at this stage. Hopefully all will go well, I love being productive and getting stuff done. Here’s to a good month!

Camp NaNo: July 2016 – Retrospective

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It’s now August 1st, so how did the last month go?

Well, first of all good news – my arm is doing much better! I can type again – yay! Seriously, there are not enough exclamation marks in the world, to say how pleased and relieved I am about that. I loathe dictation and I would not have done half as much as I did, if I had been stuck using it.

So how much did I do?

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Season Six Speculation and Writing

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Warning this post contains spoilers for Season Six of Once Upon a Time.

Confession time I’m actually writing fanfiction again these days. I first started writing fanfic when I was 11 and it was predictably terrible. By the time I was 16 I had decided to try and begin writing original works. I think I wrote my last fanfic in 2009 and then I quit. I closed the door on that chapter of my writing life and moved on.

Well a couple of months ago I was struggling. The sequel to my Crime/Sci-Fi novel was going badly, I loathed it so much and writing was an absolute chore. For fun I decided to write a short fanfic story, just to remember what it was like to enjoy writing.

One short story led to another, which led to another, which eventually led to the long multi-chapter work in progress I’m currently writing. Why am I doing this? I hear you ask. Isn’t a waste of time? Shouldn’t I be concentrating on my original novels?

I’m going to tell you a secret now.

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July Update

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I didn’t blog in June.

Part of that was lack of impetus with Once Upon a Time having finished until the fall. However, I was going to blog about Captain America: Civil War – the best marvel movie yet!! It’s just my arm has been playing up again and I can’t really type right now. It’s super weird dictating a blog post, even weirder than dictating my novel and that’s saying something – I really loathe dictation.

So what have I been up to? Well the answer to that is mostly getting used to dictation. I love writing, it’s my life really and so stopping until my arm is better is a non-starter. I have no idea what’s wrong with my arm or why it hurts so much, it could never get better. However, given how frustrating I find dictation, it has been slow going and the goals I set myself have had to be quietly pushed back.

It’s Camp NaNo this month. I just checked and I didn’t blog about April. Back in April I tried a redraft of Book Two of my Crime/Sci-Fi series and it went very badly. That book two was cursed from the beginning. I started the first draft April 2015 and had to stop 2/3rds of the way through because of illness. I didn’t finish it until the October and then when I went to revise it in February I found it was un-salvageable and needed to be completely rewritten. I started the redraft this April and got halfway through but I just couldn’t do it. I’ve decided to scrap the whole series I wound up hating it so much.

However, last November I wrote book one of a new Military Science Fantasy series and I love that more than anything. Again because of illness I didn’t finish it last November, instead I finished it in March. Last month (June) I was supposed to write a prequel short story but because of my arm I didn’t manage to finish it.

Therefore for Camp NaNo this month my goal is to finish the first draft of the prequel. I will also start Book Two of the series and hope that this book two, will go a lot better than the last sequel I tried to write. Given how I feel about the series generally (I love it), I’m hopeful that it will be ok but it’s still quite scary. I harbor no ambitions that I will be able to finish book two this month but I hope that I will finish it by the end of August. It’s technically possible as I’ve averaging about 2k a day with dictation (it is so much slower than typing, I miss typing so much) but we’ll have to see.

This blog is probably going to go on a hiatus for the summer. I might drop back in and say how Camp NaNo (July) went but anything else will be dependent on my arm. This is so weird dictating like this. Once Upon a Time (Season 5) premieres on the 25th of September, hopefully I’ll be able to blog about that. I’m certain I’ll have a lot to say, I nearly always do.

The 200th Edition

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I had this blog 16 months before I broke 100 posts. I said at the top of that one that I had tried to keep a blog before, and that none of them had breached a dozen posts before I abandoned it and eventually took it down out of embarrassment.

34 months later and I’ve reached 200 posts. It took me just over twice as long to double the number. However, the key point is that I did double it, I am still here and still writing posts. I’ve now had this blog over four years and I’ve written about 350,000 words over those 200 posts.

I can’t prove it, without a serious time investment, but I’m pretty sure the length of my posts has increased over the years. Another thing that has changed has been what I’ve blogged about. In my post – the 100th edition – I talked about what had changed over those 100 posts. It was a mixed bag of a post and I’m going to repeat that here.

What has changed over the last 100 posts?

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NaNo 2015: Retrospective

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It’s December 1st so November and NaNo is officially over for another year. There is of course Camp NaNo next April and July, but let’s forget that for the moment.

Before the month started I had two clear goals:
– Have a completed first draft by the end of the month
– Write every single day

At the start of the month I admitted that I would ideally like to go further:
– Beat last years total of 61k at a minimum
– Finally crack triple figures (100k) to make a good lifetime achievement total

Well how did that go? The answer is pretty clear if you take a look at the widget on the sidebar to the right. The total – 55,618 words. Do I have a complete draft? No. Did I beat last years total? Nope. Which obviously means I didn’t get my 100k. Did I write every day? Well, that depends on your definition, more on that under the cut.

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