Excerpt Monday: Take 9

Once a month, Bria Quinlan and Alexia Reed host a bunch of authors who get together and post excerpts from published books, contracted work or works in progress, and link to each other. You don’t have to be published to participate–just be a writer with an excerpt you’d like to share. For more info on how to participate, head over to the Excerpt Monday site or click on the banner above!

This month’s excerpt is drawn from Revealed. I decided to continue where we left off last month’s excerpt where Barrington and Marcia were paired up at dinner and he has no clue why she’s so standoffish with him. She can’t believe even he has forgotten the incident which solidified her introverted tendencies, when after all he was to blame, too bad if he didn’t know her identity at the time.

As always, any comments or criticisms are welcome.

56 Days Left

I feel like I’ve made progress this week. Not as much as I’d like, but I can say that progress was still made. With 56 days remaining until the end of the year, I have about 52k words left on my Regency Beneath His Touch and figure I’m about 42% of the way done. I’ve almost made my +5k goal for this week. That gives me Thanksgiving, Christmas and two other days off at this point. Phew!

Working with others has been extremely helpful in achieving my word count each day. Just knowing someone else is out there working at the same time on their own project is incredibly motivating and inspiring. I’ve noticed more and more people joinging in with #amwriting, #writegoal, #goalwar on Twitter and I know many people gather in chat rooms like the one on Romance Divas. Some groups are even using AIM’s group chat feature to do timed writing sprints. No matter where you find it, or what you call it, it works for many people. When you have to admit how many words you did or didn’t write, it can push you to keep at it.

Even though I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, I’m still reading about it and one of the great finds this year is Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld’s dueling NaNoWriMo tips on their blogs. In Ms. Larbalestier’s post NaNo Tip No. 2: The Zen of First (Zero) Drafts, someone in the comments there mentioned that Nora Roberts calls that first rough draft the “discovery draft.”

I love that term and it’s accurate for the way I write as well. I may work with scads of spreadsheets and try to pinpoint the bones of my plot down before I start writing, but I still love the discoveries my characters reveal to me along the way. I’ll never be pantser enough to completely trust these little gems, but the fact that they appear from my subconscious pleases me.

Today, I had a couple minor characters surprise me with secrets they’ve been keeping hidden close, but they opened up to my heroine with the least little coaxing on her part. I love surprises like that. It’s a similar kind of fun as setting up random code for an interactive game and watching the resultant emergent behavior of the characters controlled by the computer. It might just be a tad cooler, because it’ll never happen by chance that way again. And that’s just cool.

Monday the 9th is Excerpt Monday again… you all know what that means, right? Yep, it means I have to figure out what I’m going to share this month. I don’t think it’ll be anything new from this ms, but I’ll probably dig into The Flower Queen’s Daughter or Revealed again. Whatever I choose will go live after midnight on Monday and as soon as the other links are live and posted, I’ll add them so you can find even more great excerpts to read for free.

67 Days

I decided I’m not going to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I’m taking a slower approach and hoping to complete the first full draft of my Regency, Beneath His Touch, by December 31st. This gives me 67 days to write another 56k words to end up with 90k total. When I’ve been able to sit down and focus, I’ve been able to write a bit over 1k words a day. This is lower than the 1667 words a day for NaNoWriMo. To finish this book in November, it would take around 1900 words a day, something I’m not willing to commit to right now.

Excerpt Monday: Take 8

Once a month, Bria Quinlan and Alexia Reed host a bunch of authors who get together and post excerpts from published books, contracted work or works in progress, and link to each other. You don’t have to be published to participate–just be a writer with an excerpt you’d like to share. For more info on how to participate, head over to the Excerpt Monday site or click on the banner above!

This month’s excerpt is drawn from Revealed. Barrington and Marcia have been paired up at dinner and he has no clue why she’s so standoffish with him. She can’t believe even he has forgotten the incident which solidified her introverted tendencies, when after all he was to blame, too bad if he didn’t know her identity at the time.

As always, any comments or criticisms are welcome.

Warrior Writer Recap

So, the Warrior Writer Workshop. I was scared it was going to be too similar to Todd A. Stone’s Novelist’s Boot Camp, but reading the book, Who Dares Wins, I realized the Blood Lessons and the Circle of Success rang much truer and allowed me to take those ideas beyond the writing and see the applicability to other parts of my life. This is for those who want to be the elite, not just the rank and file. One is filled with only tactical approaches, Warrior Writer is a strategic approach that helps you build for overall success.