Category: Work in Progress

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NaNoWriMo Work in Progress

NaNoWriMo: Day 1

I was awake at the stroke of midnight to start typing away. I had a character and a fluid plot, so I just started typing. I was already up to 1,218 words by the time I went to bed around 1:30am.

I woke up, did a little more writing, and pretty much throughout the day I’ve been tuning into my novel and adding a little more each time. This year I’ll go for the “rewards system” where I will only need to write one word on November 30 to get to 50,000 words. But then again, I am also aiming for more than 50,000 words this year since I feel I need to challenge myself a bit more.

In terms of the Poem-A-Day Challenge: perhaps I will sit out from participating in that. I already feel like I will fare much better with winning NaNoWriMo this year if I just mainly focus on it.

It is quite lovely seeing #NaNoWriMo trending on Twitter. I love the atmosphere of support knowing that people from around the world are doing this same marathon with me.

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change genres goals life Work in Progress

Life’s Rollercoaster & A New 101 List

There’s never really a moment of rest, it seems. In this past month, I’ve seen myself go on quite a roller-coaster ride:

– Feeling stuck and unsure of the next step

– The next step is revealed to me through my graduate admission

– Finances and interim location are discussed and cause for me to over-think

– The dust settles and I’m still pondering.

That’s just how it always goes. And at times the pace goes so quickly that I forget to post during the week. My weekends again fall on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I’m usually away from the computer on those two days. Or, if I am at the computer, I am highly distracted by my Twitter feed.

At least in this past week I have been back to writing again. I’m currently working on a short historical fiction piece for a client; not exactly a genre I dabble in normally, but it’s good to try something different. I met with a fellow writing friend today and felt empowered/motivated just sitting next to her, typing away on my AlphaSmart. I really should be more mobile with my writing sessions–after all, it’s good to change the scenery a bit.

I’ve also been working on a new 101 list to start on October 1; I had started my first 101 list on January 1, 2008, and although I lost interest in my list at the end of that year, as I near the 1,001st day of that list I see that I still managed to achieve many of the goals I initially listed on that first day. So, October 1 will mark a new cycle of 1,001 days for me. So far, these goals are more focused than my first list, and it pleases me to see how I have matured over the past 2.75 years.

I wonder if I should make a new blog to write about my new goals or if I should just mention them all on this blog. I have a tendency to get too distracted if I have too many projects to work on. I suppose blogs aren’t too hard to keep up, but the frequency of updates sometimes gets me.

Well, onward towards another weekend for the rest of the world.

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#amreading #amwriting challenge Work in Progress

The Writer’s Life.

In the past three weeks, I’ve immersed myself into the world of writing again. It’s been refreshing and energizing being able to focus on what I want to be doing with this time on my hands.

Yesterday, I participated in the New York Writers’ Coalition‘s Write-A-Thon, where participants had to write 3,000 words in order to win the challenge. I only heard about the event the day before, but I decided that it would be something fun to do on a Saturday afternoon. 3,000 words is a small feat after all compared to NaNoWriMo‘s 50,000 words. My story went for a strange turn though as I typed along on my Neo Alphasmart; it was mainly a jumble of thoughts I had in my mind.
I finally got around to reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird this past month, and now I understand why other writers say it’s an essential book on writing. Lamott’s humor was nice to read since a lot of times self-help/how-to books can be a little dry. However, she sprinkles all her advice amidst her humor, which makes the book easy to follow somehow.
I’ve been collecting information for writing contests and submitting to literary magazines; the summer at least looks eventful in the writing aspect of my life. There are other things going on throughout the summer, but I will get through it all in one piece. Time continues to mystify me, but I can’t stop and ponder that thought too long; just keep moving on, enjoying the moment.
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#amreading goals photography Work in Progress

Too many goals? & Author Photos

This past weekend I took some time off from the Internet and a lot of things that might have been keeping me stressed. It felt so nice to relax a bit and not think about things that I “needed” to do. I spent all of Saturday just reading and working out to my Wii games. Sometimes it’s best to just slow down and relax, enjoy the present.

I’ve been reading a couple of self-help books lately, and one line from Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover has struck a chord with me: to successfully accomplish something, one must have focus and take small steps at a time. It’s not the exact wording of the phrase, but that’s the general idea. It’s stayed on my mind for a couple of days because it has made me wonder if the reason why I haven’t made much strides in my writing projects is because I haven’t had focus. I’ve set out a lot of goals for myself in the field of writing, and a lot of them I’ve been attempting to work at simultaneously, e.g., finishing the first draft of Novel 4 and rewriting Novel 1. Aside from those two big goals, I’ve had smaller goals as well: blog daily in each of my blogs (three of them!), write reviews on Yelp! as often as possible, and so on. The smaller goals have become more habitual just because they are daily things for me; however, even with those, I have fallen behind.

It’s probably due to the fact that I keep just giving a little progress into each area, so it feels slow and frustrating right now. I wonder if I should reduce the amount of goals I have and try to just focus on one. What is more important to me right now?

In other news, late last week I finally received my author photos from NaNoWriMo‘s “Night of Writing Dangerously”. I had nearly forgotten about those photos until I saw the email in my inbox; they were initially supposed to be ready by February, but they probably got backlogged in their work. No worries; I was still glad to see the high-quality pictures. I’ll be posting them up on my website and my profiles as soon as I crop them down a little (they are very large files). I think it’s time to update my author photos anyway; haven’t updated in awhile! The pink jacket can only hold the audience’s attention for so long.

Here’s to (hopefully) a productive week ahead.

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#amwriting Work in Progress

Writing as a man.

Over the past several months, since I’ve begun writing more on a daily/regular basis, I notice a lot of my protagonists tend to be male. I had admitted it before to myself, but this week my reason for this was emphasized more as I felt myself thrown into the “wonderful” moods of being a woman:

I write from the male perspective because, when I write from the female perspective, I feel overly frilly, i.e., girly. Nothing wrong with being girly, but when I read my writing (from the female standpoint), there’s this sensation I feel where I’m just irritated by my words. The cliche feelings, the same struggles…

Not to say that writing from the male point of view does not have its stereotypes, but I don’t play into those stereotypes as much since I myself am not a man. However, because I’m well familiar with the female gender, I know the stereotypes all too well and find that, as hard as I try to avoid the stereotypes, I play into them too well when I write.

It isn’t to say that my writing may be more interesting with a male protagonist; in fact, out of the three novels I have completed so far, the one novel that seems coherent enough (in the first draft) is my first one, which has a female protagonist. With the other two completed novels and the fourth novel I’m working on, they all have male protagonists. However, the plots have been more or less complex than the first novel.

I am hoping that I will soon be able to find a good balance between writing from both male and female standpoints.