Looking for immortality and fame on other planets? Then you definitely want to fly your name to mars on the upcoming Phoenix mission. The Planetary Society has made it free and simple, but keep in mind that future Martian spammers may use the list for their own ends…
All posts by Chris
nanowrimo day 8 – the dreaded excerpt
It’s late and I’m tired, but I just wanted to let you know that I posted an excerpt over on my WriMo author page. It’s probably horrid, but I was particularly proud of it just after having written it, which was about five minutes ago.
…and that’s the real problem with the excerpt thing. I’m writing, writing, writing ever onward, never looking back, right? Well, that’s a problem when I want to pick something out to be representative of my work. This is supposed to be the Shitty First Draft That No One Reads ™, so I can’t just pluck something out and hope it’s excerpt-worthy. Neither can I go back and read through it looking for gems, because that would be ever backward, not so much onward. Even if I did find something, I’d be tempted to edit it, another no-no.
So instead, I just grabbed the last few paragraphs I’d written without cringing and uploaded them. Enjoy! (No space monkeys in this section, but maybe tomorrow. I haven’t a clue what the next chapter is about.)
a comment about comments
It turns out that I haven’t been moderating comments for like a month now. I just stumbled across them and approved a whole bunch, including some very nice WriMo encouragement. If yours was one of the comments left in the lurch, I humbly apologize.
nanowrimo day 6 – working title
I just finished Chapter 3, and my main characters have finally had a chance to catch their breath. The space monkeys are no longer chasing them, so they got to introduce themselves a bit and get through some exposition. Writing that was pretty easy, I just chugged along filling their mouths with dialogue.
And if you believe that, I have some space monkeys I’d like you to meet.
nanowrimo day 4 – oh, boy.
So this is when it gets hard. That didn’t take long.
I just finished the second chapter, and boy was it a tough one. My main character gets put on trial for something she didn’t do, and things have to get really bad in order to get her in the right place to make the rest of the novel happen. I spent the last two days putting it off, either not writing at all or writing things that weren’t the actual trial.
As it turns out, I hate the idea of writing dialogue for characters I don’t like, especially when they’re doing bad things to my protagonist. The scene required Bad People to do and say Bad Things, but I just couldn’t bring myself to make it happen. (I even invented a new character so that my other main character would have someone reasonable to talk to while witnessing the whole thing.) Fortunately, once I realized this, I did what any good WriMo writer would do: I called in the space monkeys.