Meetup #1

Had my first meetup with the South Hills NaNoWriMo group. From 6-9 at the South Hills Village Barnes and Noble bookstore [sic]. Five were in attendance: Jon, Bill, Lynne, Laura, and me. we talked about our projects, our planning, and how important and unimportant character names are right now. Lesson: never trust a man with two first names. We are all also forced to finish our novels now, because we may or may not have turned down $400 worth of impromptu Penguins tickets to do so.

A Novel in Three Days

30 days?!

Mwa-ha-ha-ha, you lightweight scalliwags! I ought to take your precious laptops and give them to someone with real talent and drive, like Michael Moorcock! He wrote more in a day than you do in a week! He also planned his fingers off, and since it's that time of year, I figured I'd share an article I found on his methods.

Michael Moorcock is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author who was knighted a Grand Master by the SFWA. Like most Grand Masters, at the peak of his career he was churning out words like a printing press. The article below lays out some of his methods and tricks for proliferacy in a short period of time.

How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock

The 3 A.M. Epiphany

What writing books do you use as general practice or preparation for NaNoWriMo?

While perusing the writing section of my hometown brick-and-mortar library, I found a book called The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley. It contains a series of creative writing prompts and exercises that get you to think about point of view, characters, descriptions, psychology, etc. Each prompt is about 300-700 words, so you can knock a few out in one sitting or really get into a detailed one if the mood and topic suits you. I highly recommend it.

For example, today I worked on a 600 word exercise that dealt with synesthesia the poetic description of a sense impression in terms of another sense, as in “a loud perfume” or “an icy voice.” Here are two of my favorite sentences I wrote today (emphasis on synesthesia):

The door to Room 307 hung wide open, letting each chemo-industrial note bounce and scream out of the portal.

Since the smell of this room was green and sterile and the sound was now the intensity of a college marching band falling off a cliff and landing on the largest tin can collection in the continental United States, Joe walked normally now past the jars of bitter formaldehyde and spicy ethanol, past the posters of animal dissections done in the vivid color palette of an ecstasy junkie’s autumnal hike along a Bostonian stream, and past the dry erase board large enough to hold two medium-sized Clydesdales.

Here's a link to my full exercise should the alluring perfume of curiosity pull you.

Exercise 17 Synesthesia

22 Days and Counting

With about 3 weeks until the start of NaNoWriMo, I start my writing blog as a way for fellow writers to communicate with me about our projects and for all to harass me to the point that every mitochondria in every cell is driving me to complete this project by November 30 so help me Thor. I plan to have some more solid details for this Thursday night, when I will put aside my smoldering disdain for B&N and join the South Hills NaNoWriMo writing group. I know this post wasn't extremely inviting or informative, but exposition sprinkled with figurative language beats "F1RST P0ST!!!1!"