I originally titled this entry “Back t the Grindstone,” but I thought that was a kind of a crappy title–which it is, isn’t it? The Dare is not supposed to be a grindstone. It’s supposed to be fun. And luckily, it is. I’m pretty stoked to work on my semi-secret project with Jeff (my brother), […]

So here’s a fun thing. It’s part of the reason I wanted to make this Novel Dare a two-month deal rather than a one-month fling. The fact is that for the previous four days I got a big-fat zero words in on the novel. But I knew going in this would be the case because […]

TLDR Version: 1,300 new words today (another 1,500 recycled). Good action scene pushed its way into the world. Life on the page is getting complicated. I mentioned at the beginning of this project that I was working a bit differently from usual—that I started by “plotting” the whole story. Meaning I spent time breaking things […]

Well, here’s something fun. For some time I’ve been wanting to do something with fiction in audio. I’ve been into podcasts and audio stories for some time, after all—even before the total craze seems to have hit. And I’ve played with it a little in the form of doing the odd podcast here and there […]

I was right yesterday when I said that stopping in the middle of a scene would give me some momentum leading into today. Once I got my brain settled into my alien environment, I grabbed the reins and plopped down another 800 or so clean new words that “finished” the scene. There was a lo […]

My brain is still settling into the alien world and is flailing with that “you’ll never be able to make this work” kind of vibe. It’s coming, though. I’m also still shuffling bits of the plot back and forth as things settle into the timeline. That’s a long way of saying things were slow yesterday—I […]

The best plans go awry, right? Today settled out all right. I ended up with what I’ll credit as 1,000 new words (and some recycle). But that’s fine. Today is a big fake baseball day (I should probably make a reference post to that sometime since I talk about it sometimes), so I knew in […]

First, in a case of good news catching up, I managed an extra 500 words yesterday evening after posting my update, so that bumps me up a touch—and every little bit helps. This morning I got a clean 1,000 words when I hit “open ground” and just had fun letting the characters play. That’s always […]

You’ll be shocked to learn that having words already written on an earlier draft of a story doesn’t really speed you up as much as you’d think. In fact, it slows you down. Truth is, I’d probably have been better off just to dump them and write fresh—but instead I spent today “recycling” over the […]

I finished yesterday with about a thousand new words. Hard to call, really, for reasons I outlined yesterday. Getting a little more settled now. I’ll claim 600 new words this morning and expecting maybe 500 more before calling it a day. We’ll see. I’ve got a chore or two to deal with, and then maybe […]