January follow up

Oh wow it's already more than a month I wrote a blog post. Well I did spend lot's of time in January writing - end effect four stories in one series - a new one together around 2,5K and a stand alone story inspired by a necklace in internets. Hmm five stories in four weeks, that's a nice result.

I took a challenge on H/C LJ community to write a WC wee!kids fanfic by 13th March :) Yes, 13th is my favorite date. So I need to get an idea, I actually have two so it might be I will write both.

The story from my other series is bad, so it's waiting for re-write, but I have another idea in that series to write. My mind is working in interesting way, but I don't mind. It allowed me to also read my NaNo story and be completely blown away... well maybe not completely but I was surprised it's not so bad. It will be better, with time and edits and fixed plot and timeline, but overall it wasn't so very bad. It's salvageable, most of it and with few good ideas for plot continuum it will be even better than I think right now.

The bad thing is I love Scrivener and right now I need to wait a little while longer, only few days more to buy finally the full copy with 50% NaNo discount. Phew and then I can easily come back to writing.

So the writing plans are as follow:
1. H/C challenge story
2. 5th story in the Shades of Gray series
3. 4th story in Neal by any other name series
4. NaNo edits

Oh and I published my crossover story with SG-1/WC not bad, not bad at all. It will be one shot but maybe I should think about more crossovers or some kind of continuation. And I did that thanks to encouragement of my new Beta, I like having two betas - it gives me view from other side.

Well then writing plans done, it's time for PLOTTING!

Happy New Year!

It's till few hours to midnight in my part of the World, but in other's the new year is already there. As I will be on a party let's start early then: HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012!

I hope that this year will be spend more on writing than the year before... 2011 wasn't my best year, but in writing topics was quite successful. I finished NaNoWriMo - writing 52K of words, second longest fic I ever wrote (not finished yet, but soon). I got some drop in ideas after that, going back to "Peter's Pan Shadow" trying to salvage as much as possible and write new parts. I was partially successful, and then I was hit with something and produced "Home for Christmas" and "Toddler in (stolen) tiara", oh and I put my work on AO3 (yeey got invite early!)... let's add to that "Whiskey Barrel" my NaNo story is slowly, slowly getting some updates - in my head for now, but it's starting to get some more shape, better shape, I hope.

"Peter's Pan Shadow" is shadowing my thoughts, it's also slowly getting new shape, and I really, really should start writing them down... I started writing another piece of "Neal by any other name" verse, and some other new fic, with a temporary (or not) title, we'll see how well that will work.

So Happy New Year - I wish for you and others health and happiness. For myself so many things... but most important health, happiness and writing muse ;)

Template

New template on the blog. As blogger change something and I can't apply the reviewed last template I will temporary use one of blogger designated ones. We'll see how long that will take... as temporary solutions are usually those that keep longest...

The lost message

I was sure I wrote a post about finishing NaNo...

I was sure the template I use will work without problems...

Seems me being sure wasn't enough - I think I lost the WriMo post... and I have no idea when the template just got loose... I'll fix that, promise as soon as I figure out why it's not working anymore and how to fix it, eventually I will find an updated template.

About NaNo.. I did finish it with over 50K on 27th November, and let me tell you it was a very elevating experience. Of course now I have absolutely no push or pull to write, which is bad as I just published first chapter of my new fanfic... it was in the works before November, and as usual over few writing blocks, but now it's out in the open. It's  not my best work, but I think it's decent. Well see as I have only part one from three parts done, and some of part two is ready too...

Till later!

NaNoWriMo Update

NaNo the ultimate challenge for anyone that like to write and decide to take it on is exhausting, really. The longest story I wrote so far had around 20K of words.... and it took me over four months to write, with several writing blocks in between.

For NaNo the challenge is to  write 50K words in maximum 30 days... impossible? Actually not, I'ts day ten and I wrote yesterday less than the NaNo standard expected 1667 words, but still I'm ahead of the average plan. Why? Because I planned to write 2500 words a day and till now skipped only four times, two of them were recovered during the weekend when I simply wrote whatever count I needed to hit my goal. As I wasn't able to do it also for the last two days it seems there will be need for some recovery during the weekend.

Current lessons from WriMo...

1. Having an outline is helping a lot
2. No problem that I had gaps in the outline, my story decided to write itself a little and suddenly something that was in the outline in Chapter 3 was written as late as in Chapter 5
3. If you let your mind wonder and just write the story and characters will come to you - like a pair of detectives that I never through about when making an outline and characters list
4. It's possible to write 2500 words daily on normal working day
5. It take's more to write the words than I through it will. Taking into consideration I was practicing on 750words.com for three months and I knew how fast I write, it's still slower... maybe because I think to much?
6. Thinking about your story is good, editing it right away - nope. For NaNo you need to squash or even kill your inner editor to survive. For now I allow my editor to just mumble around and fix some obvious mistakes when I make a read a day after. And allow to think that some scenes will need to be moved, but only after I have everything written.
7. I'm on 18K words right now almost 19K, and still 31K to go... and I still believe I can do it! 

Writing challange

This year is writing year, since February when my attention was stolen by "White Collar" I wrote six fanfics going from 340 words to little over 20000... all in English, yeah that's strange. Then I discovered the 750words.com site on which you write every single day your 750 words... I started in July, struggled in August and took up on a challenge in September - writing every single day, yay! And of course I flunked October just right in the beginning. Most probably cos I got huge writers block and half of September spent on rants instead of writing the fiction. Well that happens and just sometimes you should take a break from writing, so I did, and I'm back at least partially - not to writing itself but my muse starts to push some ideas in my direction.

Also in August I decided to try my hand at NaNoWriMo in November - it's National (International already) Novel Writing Month - you got one month to write a 50,000 words novel. No matter the genre, original or fanfiction, plot or no plot just sit and write.. oh and correct mistakes later. That was one of the reasons I started  writing every day to get the feeling if I can do it. To meet the goal of 50,000 words it's approximately 1667 words to be written daily, totally doable - it take's me around two hours to do it when I write in my "think about story speed" which is currently somewhere between 20-26 words per minute (yes, yes I'm numbers maniac). So not so bad as I also fix the most important things at the same time, I figure that I should be able to write the daily goal of 1600-1800 and hit some more at the weekends.

The only obstacle in my path is as usually the idea, I got something. Since I saw my brothers photo I knew I should write a story to it and decided it should be for NaNo. I allowed the idea to brew a little and came to conclusion it has to be a fanfic... well yes it's an easy way out but I do know that writing original story will be to challenging for that one. So I got that, few days ago I came up with the title "Whiskey Barrel" and now I have to go on with the plot, that is still in the works. To get 50,000 the plot has to be complicated and at least had two-three additional plots to run the story - there is something I learned from writing "The Hot Cold Case" there has to be something more. Of course jumping between plots, relate them and so one is difficult but hey no one says writing itself is easy.

Plus the additional characters, oh my I totally forgot about them, ech yes and writing a short script of what should happen and when, it helped with THCC and should help here, no matter that in the end it was somehow different. The point was to have a frame of the story and that was helpful - for short fics I don't need one, for the long ones it's very very good to have it.

So the title is there, the cover is there, the main idea is starting to raise it's head... now to work on some details and I should be ready to start writing on 1st November. Which me luck!

Cyber life

Today news spreading all over the world is dead of Steve Jobs. Visionary  of current mobile business, and not only phones but also tablets and overall way we look on communication between people. Who, beside him and few other people that now create things, would have imagine that we will all have phones in our pockets, able to make photos, calculate complicated things faster than space shuttles and able to surf the invisible network. We live in fast pacing world, going faster and faster with every minute - so lets stop for a moment and look around.

Stop.

Google offensive

Long awaited, at least by me, changes to Bogger have come. Google is re-designing all of their tools to follow the same design as Google+. Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Translate, Search all already followed with the experimental switch - for all those that want to test new design a link shows up to switch. If you don't like it you can go back to traditional view.


I like the new ones. Smooth, easy, clear. That's what I like. It's little big - designed more for big screens that my small 12" laptop but it's not something that interferes much. When I started to use G+ I read quite quickly that there will be also change coming to Blogger, and finally there it is!


It's follows the sleek look that other products now have, uses the same clear types, options and settings. Cool stuff. Stats now are easy to see right away on dashboard, but the screen to write your post start incredibly small... 


Oh..I just wrote enough for the "page" I started writing on to automatically extend to a "full page view" - cool!!


The posts settings are on right hand column easy to access without need to scroll down the screen you are writing on. And the automatic change of the page is fantastic, I like to see what I'm writing without need to have to move back and forth. What I would like to see would be a word counter that shows also on the settings how many words I've produced... but hey for that I can use 750words.com page that I use anyway for my daily writing exercise. 


Playing around with options - most have the new look, some not yet - I clicked something in statistics page and found myself back in the old blogger view. Otherwise seems that first day of launch was quite stressful. 


On other Google news the Offline Gmail, Docs and Calendar are back! Google announced yesterday that they are rolling out the functionality back based on HTML5. For Gmail you will need an app from google web store, but it seems calendar and docs can work without it. I will see cos for now I can't find either the app or the option in the docs to use them offline. In the past there was a tool named google gears that allowed to work on some of them offline, now there is an app to install into Chrome. Need to research if it's also available for other web browsers.

Straw enthusiasm

Straw enthusiasm is probably my biggest flaw. I often find thing's I like, got all my attention into it and burn and crash some time later completely forgetting, or coming back seldom if at all. 

What we call civilization

In old beautiful days of my childhood my father took us (my brother and I) on bicycle trips across Poland. I don't remember much from the earliest trips as I was from four to seven years old, but I do remember the later trips when I was around twelve. That thing western countries call civilization looked completely different on this side of the Berlin Wall.