Things I"ve been doing to prepare for NaNoWriMo

1. Took a small break from writing and did other creative things like draw, make pop-ups, etc.

2. Polished and spent lavish time on my two outlines using the Snow Flake Method and Phase Drafting. It was fun giving myself permission to spend more time outlining instead of telling myself it was just a distraction and I should be writing instead. This is the one time of year I don't have to feel guilty for indulging in back story and extraneous facts about my novel.

3. Reading more books, listening to more podcasts about writing.

4. Cleaned up my writing space and hung a word-count chart on my cork board. I even armed it with little golden stars at the ready for each time I complete a daily goal.

5. Took some pictures I hope to turn into banner art for my novel to be displayed in my signature on the NaNoWriMo forums. I'll post it here when it's done.

6. Ignored most of my RSS feeds in an effort not to overwhelm myself with the writing world.

I want to hear from you about your writing!

In the comments below, post the following:

Title of WIP:

Genre:

How you prepare for NaNoWriMo:

Here's mine.

Title: Dragons of Windsor

Genre: Historical Adventure Fiction

How I prepare: see above.

Writer's Block

I sat down to write today and realized there are parts in my plot I want so badly to make sense. But they don't. I want them to happen. But it's not logical that they should.

I need some strong plot devices to motivate my characters and move them to do what I want.

What are your favorite plot devices? How do you get your characters to do what you want them to?

Also, it's been awhile so here's a new Metaphor of the Day Assignment:

Write a metaphor that describes either a pleasant or unpleasant aspect of your main character.

Example: (Highlight the text below if you need inspiration)

(Note: these are about two different characters)

She was as thin as a sickly piece of grass. Even her complexion looked green and tender.

or

The herbalist was a flower herself: she bloomed where she planted and looked after her own.

Laptops are Weird

I agree with this sentiment.

BBC Audiobooks America is hosting an Original Audio Book contest on Twitter. Neil Gaiman started off the contest with a sentence, and BBC Audiobooks America is choosing from thousands of tweets which sentences will go into the book. I guess it's also going to be read by a professional and made available for free downloading off of iTunes.

I decided I've been lacking in social networking lately so I decided to give it a try. Even though I balk at Twitter books, I decided to do this just for fun. After I tweeted about 35 sentences, one of them made it in! I was excited. Please don't say I've written a book with Neil Gaiman. How weird that such a marvelous boast could mean so little.

Now that I've stepped away from the contest, I feel overwhelmed. Twitter is a monster. It's great and fun, but totally exhausting. I don't quite know if I approve of it or not. Hope BBC Audiobooks America makes it work though. The story so far can be found here in their Twitter feed. It's actually kind of interesting. Mirrors, Puppets, and Promises. It's got it all. :D

NaNoWriMo is around the bend! And so is Cake. No lie.

I'm officially registered for NaNoWriMo this year which happens in November. My name is leolewis if anyone wants to add me as a buddy.

What is NaNoWriMo? Check out the link. It's a challenge where many writers across the globe attempt to write a book in an entire month. (A book being defined as 50,000 words. In reality, that's a pretty short book, but hey, we're doing it in a month.)

I feel I am more prepared now than last year (which was my first try). In 2008 I made it to 30,000 words, 10,000 of those being written on the last day in November over a period of 9 hours straight. My butt was pretty sore after that.

But this year I've already started outlining, using a method called Phrase Drafting. I'm combining it a little bit with the Snowflake method. We'll see how it works.

Does anyone have experience with either of these methods? Do they work for you? Don't work? What does work for you?

Ok, now it's off to bed to dream about my wonderful characters while I can. I'm sure by the time November blows over I'll be sick of them.

MDA:

What's a metaphor for NaNoWriMo?

Highlight the text to see my example if you need inspiration:

Example: NaNoWriMo is a piece of cake.

It sits there at the end of the dinner table just waiting to be eaten. It promises me it will be easy to eat. But I have to get through my vegetables in a hurry before I can even take a bite. As I shovel peas into my mouth, I gag. As I look at the steamy bowl of characters before me, knowing my mother will make me eat some of those too, I get a little queasy. Then I remember the cake, and I make myself be more patient. Soon my mother is putting really tough and dry plot meat onto my plate. It's tough to chew. I try to wash it down with some setting, but it doesn't help. Finally, after three hours of arguing with my mother about how many vegetables I have to eat, and asking if I really have to clean my plate, I get to bite into that delicious piece of raspberry-I-finished-neener-neener-inner-critic-cheese cake.

I love mystery books

Someone left a mystery book on my desk yesterday. It's not a mystery genre, but just mysterious because I don't know who left it there. It is a copy of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

Thank you to whoever decided to let me read this. If you want it back, you'll have to let me know who you are. If it is a gift, thank you, thank you, thank you. It was really nice of you to think of me.

TMI

The other day I had a bit of caffeine.

And I went bonkers.

I usually don't have caffeine so it really buzzed me.

Then I attempted to write a character dossier for one of my MCs. She lives on an alien planet so when I got to the third question which was "What is his/her birth date?" I got stuck.

Then I went crazy.

I spent the next 4 hours figuring out an alien solar system, how two moons on a planet affects the inhabitants time keeping systems, developed an alien calendar, and measured how events and years there would match up with Earth's time system. Then I finally had a date for when she was born, and was able to notate it in both Earth time and the alien planet's time.

I thought, "Whew! Got that question good. The rest should be easy."

Then it asked what her nationality is.

So I started making family trees, creating new characters for her lineage, and developing a political system for the entire planet! At this point, I contacted my cousin and said "Help!" She got me to slow down and refocus on the character dossier without creating new, interesting and completely unnecessary details.

To those addicted to Too Much Information syndrome, (or WBD, World-Builder's Syndrome)my heart goes out to you. Please find help before your novel becomes a beast. (This is sometimes also known as Tolkien's Syndrome, in case you didn't know. He was never cured. But he was creative enough to get people to not pay attention to his, er, excessive display of a world he knew way too much about.)

So can I label myself as an extraterrestrial astrophysical chronologist? Ever since reading the first page of The Color of Magic, I've wanted to be able to use a title as cool as astrozoologist.

Quickie Metaphor Advice

I was looking over some of my older posts and saw the one titled "Like".

Something I've learned since posting that:

If a comparison has the word 'like' in it, it's a simile and not a metaphor.

Example:

The weather was like a wet blanket. = simile. The day is not actually a wet blanket, but it is just like one, it is similar to one. I use like when the metaphor I want doesn't quite match up in every obvious way to what I'm comparing it to.

Example #2:

The weather was a wet blanket. = We have a Metaphor! We all know the weather cannot be a literal blanket. (Though it can be wet.) So we know it's a metaphor, even though the speaker is telling us the weather WAS a wet blanket. Herein lies the power of metaphors: You are making a comparison and claiming that one object is actually another. It says that the weather was so much like a wet blanket, that it could actually be called one, instead of muddying up the comparison by making the reader think about why the weather is only 'like' a wet blanket and thinking about all the ways in which it is not. The switch over from 'like' to 'is' can be very satisfying, and offers a more punctuated picture to the reader.

If you are very good at building a suspension of disbelief for your readers, metaphors in place of similes are awesome. Similes can sometimes break that carefully formed bubble you've created for your readers by making them think about 'like, but not exactly as', when you want them to think about what is.