I did a lot of writing on Saturday, and a whack of revision on Sunday. As often happens when I’ve spent a lot of time and emotional energy working on a story, I found that long after I’d stepped away from the computer physically, I was still very much there mentally. Jo noticed that I wasn’t quite myself and I tried to explain, but my mind and attention being divided I’m not sure I did a good job.

I was still crawling out of the story.

When I first step away from the computer I’m still very deliberately and consciously thinking about the story I’d been working on. Should I do this, or that? How would that character really react to the other thing? Making mental notes of things I need to remember to add, change or take out. Making physical notes in case my mental ones fail. However, even after I’m done that and I’m not deliberately thinking about the work, I am disconnected from reality.

Not completely. You don’t need to call me a shrink, but that part of me which is always sort of outside myself (really, don’t call a shrink) observing things and taking notes is bigger than usual. I feel like I’m wading through a thick mental fog, and it takes some time to clear.

It doesn’t always happen, and seems to be mostly after the more intense writing/revising sessions I have. It’s an interesting phenomena, one I need to consider more in order to describe better perhaps. Anyway, I thought I’d share

Writers, tell me sometimes this happens to you too. What about people with different occupations and hobbies, do you expirience something similar, or do writers have the market cornered on this one?

I am a nerd.

I’m also overweight.

I came across this interview with Jay Lake and Elizabeth Bear on Shrink Geek and when I read it learned about Eowyn Challenge. This is so incredibly full of awesome. I think it has inspired me to get off my butt and start exercising again.

So basically you get to walk to Mordor, or Rivendell or wherever you want from Tolkein’s books. How cool is that?

I haven’t planned out my route yet or decided who I’m going to follow, but I am definitely going to do this. I’m going to get an audiobook version of Lord of the Rings (or The Hobbit, I haven’t decided which path I’m going to take yet) and listen to it as I go. I’ll be using my stationary bike rather than walking (winter is coming dudes) and I think this will be lots of fun.

Care to join me? C’mon, you know you want to.

I’ll have my route planned and hopefully audiobook in hand and be good to start Monday. I’d love it if you were coming along with me.

I got my November newsletter out today. In addition to a bit of rambling, it includes one of my zombie poems from this month and a scene from Shadows (which I’m rewriting as my NaNoWriMo project). Yay for first drafts!

So, for the second year in a row I have stopped trying to write See the Sky Again as a NaNo novel. This time for different reasons.

Last year when I started writing See the Sky Again there were still a lot of blank spots in my mind. I knew the setting, one of the characters and the ending. That was pretty much it. When I stopped writing it as a NaNo novel it was because I thought I should fan away a bit more of the fog and solidify some plot points in my brain before I worked on the project in earnest. Then I got distracted with other projects and See the Sky Again got put on the back burner for a while.

Well, when I dusted it off to work on again I had a good idea of where it was going and how it was going to get there. Or, if not good, at least I had an idea, which was more than last year. Unfortunately, as I was writing on it for NaNo I just wasn’t feeling it. I love the story, and I’m excited to tell it, but I don’t think it’s destined to be written in this way. Which is too bad because I’d like to get the first draft done sometime soon LOL

However, like I said above, I’ve pushed it to the side again for a while (shorter term than last time I hope LOL). Now I’m working on the re-write of Shadows as my NaNoWriMo project.

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What?

I couldn’t help it. Shadows won’t leave me alone. It’s always on the edges of my brain, demanding my attention. After the critiques I got from Jim C. Hines and Deena Fisher I had some really great ideas on how to improve it – trying to make it wait its turn until after I got the first draft of See the Sky Again done was, apparently, a very bad idea. I couldn’t focus on StSA because I really wanted to be re-writing Shadows.

Now that’s what I’m working on for NaNo (Note to any rules lawyers out there: I know that’s technically against the rules and um…I don’t care) and it’s going well. I’m enthusiastic about writing again and I really feel like the story is being filled out more this time. (One of my goals was to add more description and fill out the middle which I felt was lacking.) Yay! I’m hoping to complete the ‘new first draft’ via NaNoWriMo and then, just to be novel, NOT workshop it to death.

My nano word count is 6,652 so far, and I haven’t written yet today. Soon, I hope.

I’m also still working on the Poem-A-Day challenge and still loving it. Wheee! I’ve got 4 zombie poems (that I Love) and 2 more mainstream ones. I haven’t even looked at today’s prompt yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be sure and share at least one of the zombie pieces in my newsletter this month.

So far, November is being good to me. I hope you can say the same thing

It’s technically day two of NaNoWriMo, but I haven’t written anything for my project yet today, so I feel like I’m still on day one. I’m still lacking enthusiasm about NaNo, which is kind of odd because I like the novel I’m writing so you’d think that enthusiasm would bleed over. So far, not so much. Yeah. Weird. I told you.

In addition to doing NaNoWriMo this year, however, I’m also doing the PAD Chapbook Challenge. Times two, actually. My friend Beth Cato told me about it and I said I’d do it if she did. She accepted my challenge, so on top of the 50,000 words we need to write this month, we’ll also be writing 30 poems.

Actually, I’ll be writing up to 60 of them because I’ve decided to do the Chapbook Challenge times two. The first collection of poems will be mainstream and the second will be horror — zombies, to be specific. If a prompt doesn’t lend itself well to one of those genres I may only write one poem that day, but I’d really like to see two a day. We’ll see, I gues.

I hope to share some results in my newsletter, if there turns out to be anything worth reading just yet LOL There isn’t going to be much time for revision until December.

I’m pretty happy with the PAD challenge so far, in case you hadn’t guessed, and my word count for NaNo is still on track, so I’m counting day one as a victory.