I dreamed about the book last night. I think that’s a good sign, though to be honest I can’t really remember exactly what the dream was. That’s how dreaming is for me, mostly—I wake up with the memory of having dreamed, feeling a lingering aura for maybe a few minutes, a snippet of it in […]
Read More ...Category Archives: Dare to be Bad
Day 6: 2K, Weirdness, and Bubbles
For folks who are insane enough to want to follow this process, I thought it might be fun to talk about outlining vs. pantsing, and how I’ve worked so far this time. The fact of the matter is that I’ve worked in all sorts of ways, and I think the “right” answer is regarding whether […]
Read More ...Day 3, 4, & 5 – 9K Words and the Power of the Dare
Yeah, I know. Supposed to be daily updates. I get it. Bottom line: things are going pretty much as they need to. As expected, on Thursday I lost half a day to a doctor’s appointment, then took care of errands Friday (yesterday afternoon) before having a great conversation with Lisa (the friend/writer who is Daring […]
Read More ...Day 2: 2500 Words and Thoughts On Time
I had another pretty good day that resulted in just short of 2500 words. I’m doing a lot of exploratory work at this point. I think I’m writing out of order to some degree, and that some of this is going to move out into later parts of the story—but I wrote them now because […]
Read More ...Day One: 500 Words and a Look Into Happiness
Day one of the Novel Dare is in the books and despite the fact that I only created about 500 words, it was a pretty good one. Having decided to write the weird baseball SF/fantasy/thriller, I decided I had to set my brain by going back and touching base Casey Neal, my main character. So […]
Read More ...And So It Begins: Novel Dare, Day 1
I did NaNoWriMo* once. It wasn’t much fun. (* National Novel Writing Month is where several hundred thousand people sit down to cram 50,000 words into a month’s time). For me the problem is that NaNoWeiMofeels feels more like a carnival than a practice, more a flash of frivolity than going to a place of […]
Read More ...Workload and the Writer
So, yeah … remember that thing about how quitting the day job to write full time will help with the work load? Not happening. This writing gig, it turns out, is just about the same as any project-oriented corporate job I’ve ever had—the multitude of projects overlap forever, and the base skillset for “surviving” is […]
Read More ...Novel Dare – Day 30 – It’s Done!
Wakers “finishes” NaNoWriMo at a final tally of 51, 735. I added about a thousand words this evening, but also killed about 500 others. Ultimately the last, say, 2000 words are really a coarse outline of the end of the story. So it’s a stretch to say it’s really “done.” But it’s done enough for […]
Read More ...Novel Dare – Day 30 … 50K!
Morning Update (7:23) – A tad over 2K this morning brings me to well over 51K for the month, which means … I “win!” The story stands at present at 51,493 words, and I’m thinking it really needs about 2K more. My experience with making my own estimates, though, is that this means I’ll need […]
Read More ...Novel Dare – Day 29
Morning Update (5:47 AM) – About 500 words this AM. Yippee. I knew it was going to be a sparse morning because work has made a special call, and I’ll be heading it early for a day-long session. These things are particularly wearing because you have to concentrate all day–unlike a usual office day where […]
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