This Halloween Danica was an ‘infected’ which is sort of like a proto-vampire. It was an idea that came from a book she loved, Skulduggery Pleasant . This is a picture of her. I’m using it because it’s the closest think I’ve got to a zombie picture, and I wanted a zombie picture because I placed two more of my zombie poems from the poem-a-day challenge from November. Yay!

“Attachment” and “Last Thoughts” will appear in a future issue of Star*Line. Yay!

The biggest problem I’m finding with some of these individual poems is that while they stand alone alright for the most part, some of them lose a great deal of their horror if they are read outside of the ‘zombie apocalypse’ context. That is easy to maintain when you’ve got a whole collection, but less so when it’s just one piece. That wasn’t a problem for “Attachment” or “Last Thoughts” though, so yay!

So, it’s a whole new year. That’s what the calendar says anyway.

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. There’s no clever reason for it, I just don’t. Perhaps it’s just to be contrary. In fact, when we quit smoking several years back my husband and I made a point of doing it on December 30th rather than waiting a day or two because we didn’t want people to mistakenly think it was a New Year’s thing. Yeup. We really are that ornery

Still, this year is looking like it might be better than its predecessor. I feel like I’m beginning to crawl out of the grip of the depression I’d been fighting with over recent months. That’s a good thing for so many reasons, the least of which is not that it means writing is easier for me, it’s less of a struggle to focus and things might actually get done. Might.

Also, I have some upcoming publications I’m excited about. Shades of Green is obviously near the top of that list, but there’s also the six word memoir book from Harper’s Perrenial and a lot of poetry. I love the work I did for the November poem-a-month challenge and while I’m still working on placing most of it, I’m ridiculously excited to share it with you all. Soon, I hope. Soon.

What about you? What are you excited about for this coming year?

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.