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 ;)

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!

Saturday lazy day

Saturday started unusually early. After exhausting week, I fell asleep on the couch at Friday evening instead of writing another part of fanfic. After waking up I decided bed is much more comfortable and simply changed the places, with no real conviction I will sleep again soon. You know how it is, you fell asleep during the day and then toss and turn in the night. This time I just slept, quite long, but still waking up at 7AM. I did standard home cleaning, cat caring, and personal fun and by 12PM I was done with everything including stocking the fridge and drinking coffee.

Then was time for “dolce farniete” which lasted only two hours as I decided it’s time to get myself out of the house.

Secesja Cafe

Thursday marked a day when we finally found time to go for a coffee with Syl. It took us almost a year to agree on a moment when neither of one was working. Syl has moving work times, and in the past year I was in the office for 10-12 hours a day, neither setup was promising. That’s one of the problems in today world, you never have time for anything! Anyway finally we were able to match our calendars and have some free time to talk.

The Secesja Cafe is something new I spied on my way through city. Hidden a little bit on the way to City Hall in one of old townhouses, decorated nicely have not only chairs but also comfortable sofas? (not sure as it’s something old, like a bench but with pillows...), plus nice ladies behind the counter. It also doubles as a restaurant with “sale” prices between 1 pm and 3 pm, so if you seek a new place for lunch take a look, oh and it’s on Jana Pawła II street. Prices are not so reasonable, but the coffee and cake I tried were worth every penny.

We talked for hours and I hadn’t so much fun in ages - one of the topics was writing, cos I’m thing bad person that really needs to hear about opinions about my creations. The strange thing is I still can’t write as good as I could tell the stories in person. One of the ideas for this blog is to tell the stories in writing that I can tell in words and have the same effect. The strange thing is, it works also the other way around - I’m not able to tell the same stories I wrote...