2005 - Land's End

As noted earlier, I’ve been involved in a quasi-NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) exercise this year, doing a collaborative group of stories with several others (as organized and hosted by Doyce, thankee sir!). As we hit the end of the month, I’ve done seven stories, for a total of a bit over 22,000 words. Not quote NaNoWriMo regulation length (50K), but respectable.
Some great stuff being written by the other participants, and the overall tale has been, as Doyce puts it, “really fantastic (using several definitions of the word).” And it’s been a lot of fun. I could see continuing this model even during months other than November, though it would be interesting to see if a different setting could be tightened up a bit.
If/when the site is made public, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, though, I’m feeling quite a bit more validated as a writer — and feeling the urge to get Catspaw re-re-edited and made submittable.

{ 0 comments }

Okay, so I have no copious free time. Work, family life … gaming, blogging … housecleaning, gardening … church stuff … I’m putting in 27 hour days it sometimes feels like.
So one thing I am not doing this year, alas, is NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. I mean, aside from valuing my marriage enough not to drive Margie into a homicidal frenzy by my writing 1700 words a day, every day of the month of November, I acknowledge I simply can’t do it. Not without giving up something use of value, like CoH, or my job, or sleep. (And there’s not much left of the last of those, believe you me.)
However …
One thing I am doing is a NaNoWriMo-inspired joint writing project, organized by Doyce, run on a wiki along the lines of Neel Krishnaswami’s Lexicon RPG. Every five days, each of us has to write a short story (925 words) in a common (but broad) setting. These stories, in the beginning of the month, make references to future stories to be written (by others in the group), while as we get to the end of the month, the references tend to be back to prevous stories. Those references can be places, objects, people, events, all centered around a rather remarkable inn …
There’s nine of us doing this, so over the course of the month, we’ll jointly come up with something that’s NaNoWriMo-length (50,000 words).
You’ll notice I’m not linking to the effort yet, largely due to the group consensus that we’d rather kick this out in private first, then open it up to the world. I’m pretty happy by what I’ve done so far, particularly the story I did today (cough) (four days early and nearly three time the minimum length required) (cough), and working with a shared and forceably interlocked world like this is both frustrating and giddying.
Of course, I have no spare time to do this. But … well, when the Muse knocks, I’ve learned it’s little use to bar the door.

{ 3 comments }

This is so far off my radar of being able to do right now, or even contemplate, it might as well be buried deep, deep in the shivering blackness of the earth.
Alas.
Getting my writing kicks, at least, doing CoH character entries, but … well, damn.
(via Doyce)

{ 2 comments }