Yearly Archives: 2006

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.

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nanowrimo day 2 – on target!

I just finished my first chapter over lunch, and I’m now ahead of the curve for the second day. (Yay!) I don’t think I mentioned my other evil plan for writing this month: my novel has been carved into 15 chapters, so each day either involves opening a chapter or closing one. (My original outline called for 14 chapters, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch.)

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and so it begins

I wrote my first line this morning:

“Harmony Miller, that is the most ludicrous thing I ever did hear!”

I had intended to write it last night just after midnight, but I ended up falling asleep well before then.  Hopefully writing will keep me awake longer than reading.

Not sure how often I’ll blog about the experience. Writing 2000 words a day will either leave me a) not wanting to write another word, or b) anxious to write something other than bad fiction.  We’ll see.  Today, a few rules I set for myself:

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Pratchett recommendations

(My boss asked me for some Terry Pratchett book recommendations today.  It took a bit of research, so I figured I’d share…)

…or “Where to start?”  There are something like 35 Discworld novels spanning almost 25 years, so there’s a bit of variation.  Pratchett also loves his in-jokes and walk-ons, so you’ll definitely get more out of the books once you’re familiar with the milieu.  (You’ll also get more out of them if you know lots of movie, music, and book trivia.  The guy’s encyclopedic with his puns.)

The very first book you’ll want to read is Good Omens, written with Neil Gaiman.  It’s not a Discworld book, but it has the same kind of style so it’s a good indicator of whether you’ll like Pratchett or not.
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