Half NaNoWriMo

I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this year (for any non-writers reading this, that's where you try to write a first draft of a novel, minimum 50,000 words, entirely within the month of November). Really, I doubt I'll ever attempt it again, since the beginning of my pinched nerve debacle was when I ignored pain and refused to rest my hand and arm during my 2010 NaNo attempt.

Still, I do need a good goal to motivate me to start getting words on the page again, after having spent the last six weeks or so focused on editing and promo to the exclusion of producing anything new. And while I can't do 50,000 words in a month without putting my body at risk, I can do half that, or even a little more. 1000 words/day, on top of the keyboard time I put in for work, promo, and leisure, is a viable pace for both my hands and my creativity.

So I'm attempting a half NaNoWriMo--25,000 new words this month. They don't have to all be the same project, since I'm currently juggling three:

1) My editor wants me to expand the novella Carina just bought. It's still going to be novella-length, i.e. less than 40K, but I think I'll need to add 5-10K to its current 23K to flesh it out per her suggestions.

2) I'm working on a proposal for a full-length sequel to the novella.

3) I'd like to write a Christmas novella while it's all wintry and festive now, hopefully to be published for next year's holiday season.

Today I wrote 1024 words on Project #2:

Writing Weekend: A Bad Week

It's probably inevitable that the last week of October was a bad writing week for me. I was overdue, and I'd set myself up for it. Over the course of the month, I'd:

1) Sent in a proposal for next summer's RWA National entitled "How to Write Like a Full-Time Author When You Can't Quit Your Day Job."

2) Blogged about the same topic, and how I manage to write 1000 words/day most days, while a guest at Pink Fuzzy Slippers last week.

3) Generally been praised by lots of fellow writers for the amazing amount I get done despite having a full-time job and a kid.

That's the kind of thing that'll give a girl a case of hubris. But after this week, I'm feeling properly humble. I only wrote 1000 words or so all week, instead of the 5000-7000 I'd been managing earlier in the month. To add insult to injury, the chaos and lack of productivity didn't stay isolated to my writing--the house got messier, we lived off takeout and fast food while ingredients I'd bought to cook moldered in the fridge, and (no surprise) when I weighed in at Weight Watchers yesterday, I was up 0.8 lbs.

What went wrong?

1) I had a minor crisis at work, nothing earth-shattering, but one that forced me to spend a whole week working hard on my least favorite aspect of my job. This sapped my desire to make an effort toward everything else in my life.

2) I had a cold. Again, nothing dire, but enough to drain my energy for everything from writing to spending 45 minutes in the kitchen instead of 4 to 5 minutes looking up the menu and placing an order with Snappy Dragon.

3) I thought of a better approach to the opening chapters of my new manuscript. In the long run, this is a Good Thing, but in the short run it means going back to somewhere around the 2000-word mark of my 15,000-word manuscript and starting over. I was sufficiently annoyed at myself for not thinking of the better approach in the first place that I couldn't bring myself to sail straight into the new version without a break. (Really, Self, you had your heroine only MENACING her future mentor/friend/lover with a pistol instead of actually SHOOTING him?! A nice non-lethal GSW is a SO much better hook to end Chapter One.)

So what do I do about my Week of Fail? Well, I'm already past the feeling sorry for myself and self-berating stage--luckily for you who are reading this blog, as that stage isn't pretty. Since this is turning into a Post of Lists, here's my plan to make the first week of November better than the last one of October:

1) Accept that Weeks of Fail happen and don't make me a failure. I just had a bad week. It's happened before. It'll happen again. The key is to not let it turn into a Month of Fail.

2) Step away from my unrealistic to-do lists. I have a bad habit of overestimating how much I can get done in a given chunk of time, and so feel like a failure even if I've worked hard and accomplished a reasonable amount. Instead, I'm going to take a couple of weeks to focus on how much time I spend on work (broadly defined as everything from my day job to writing to cooking to blogging and so on...anything that's not pure leisure) rather than whether I can cross everything off my to-do list every day.

3) This is somewhat a contradiction to #2, but attempt NaNoWriMo. Why? Because it makes me feel excited rather than depressed about starting my manuscript all over again. I don't expect to get to 50,000 words by 11/30, because I'm expecting my line edits for A Marriage of Inconvenience mid-month. But I'll just subtract the number of days it takes me to do the edits and adjust my target word count accordingly.

So. That's the plan. Hopefully next weekend I'll have good progress to report.

Welcome, MJ Fredrick!

Today I welcome my first guest blogger, fellow Carina historical author MJ Fredrick!



Her book, Sunrise Over Texas, has a setting and time I've never seen in a romance before: 1826 Texas. All the Western historicals I've run across are set much later, usually post-Civil War, and I love the idea of setting one earlier, when the lack of trains and telegraphs made the frontier even more frontier-y, and closer to my own beloved Napoleonic Era.

I'll let MJ take it from here:

I love telling the story of how I came up with the idea of Sunrise Over Texas, probably because I don’t remember precisely where all my stories come from, and I remember this so clearly. I’d never written a historical romance before, and never really wanted to, though I enjoy reading them. But I love history, particularly Texas history, which I teach in 4th grade.

Two years ago this month, we were studying early Texas history. I’d taught the same lesson for a few years, from the same textbook, but this time something different happened. I was talking to the students about Jane Long. She had been abandoned at a fort near Galveston with her servant and her child. Her husband had been killed near the Louisiana border but she didn’t know it. All she knew was, if she left, he wouldn’t be able to find her. So she stayed, braving the pirates and the natives and the harsh winter. To make her enemies think the fort was still occupied by soldiers, she’d fire a cannon every day. That struck me as so cool, and as I’m known to do, I veered from the lesson to talk about how tough she must have been, how brave and scared she must have been. In the middle of my tangent, I got an image of a man riding up to the fort, and falling from his saddle. Within a matter of moments, I had cast the story, and my mind had latched onto it and wouldn’t let go.

The problem was, I was starting NaNoWriMo in three days. I’d already plotted a romantic suspense (with the help of this same class) and was ready to go. But the new story idea was shiny and compelling. Worse, it needed research! I jammed so much research in those three days, and did more as I wrote throughout November. Fortunately, my baby brother knows Texas history like mad, and he was a great resource, especially the part where I added my own ancestor, Josef de la Baume, into the story.

Jane never remarried, so while I kept a lot of Jane in Kit, I gave Kit a happy ending, always my favorite part of writing romance, whether historical or contemporary. Isn’t that why we like to read them?
----

(Susanna here again) I love the way you took such a compelling historical incident and made it your own, and also that it's a NaNoWriMo novel! I've only done NaNoWriMo once myself, with a novel that for now remains unsold and tucked away. Someday I mean to do it again, but not this year--I'm expecting my line edits for A Marriage of Inconvenience mid-month.

So, gentle readers, your turn! November is almost upon us--anyone have a good idea they're planning to tackle for NaNoWriMo?