Just another writing blog

On the verge of 30k words, which isn’t bad considering we’re now half way through NaNoWriMo. Congrats to everyone who’s made it this far without going bonkers! Only another 15 days to go and we can edit to our hearts content!

In slightly related news, I think I’m going to be unplugging the internet cable during the day when I should be NaNo-ing or working or otherwise. The likes of Twitter and Facebook are proving too tempting and I find myself wasting hours on various websites, Youtube being one of the major culprits. Also, I find myself getting too worked up over the small things, such as seeing friends’ word counts grow while mine seems to stand still. I have to admit that I am growing more and more frustrated with my novel and the way it’s developing because it’s not how I envisioned how it would go when I first started. I wanted Mana, my main character, to be more melancholy and aloof, instead he’s a little too likeable and… well, nice. I suppose it makes him more real, but it means the start of the novel is kind of pointless now. This kind of thing should be put on hold until December, of course, but I can’t help it. My inner-editor keeps rearing her ugly head and slamming the door in her face just isn’t working anymore.

Also, I find myself getting frustrated at my internet friends. I deal with a lot of shit from a fair number of them because I loathe conflict, and really I just want to help them take their minds off whatever is going on in their lives. Unfortunately the same is never true if I’m in the crappy mood. I’m just being mardy during those moments. But I digress. I have been twittering, during the nano process because for me it’s sort of like a big support group, with people in similar positions to myself asking for advice, or people whom I can give advice to, or people who share blog posts about things they think will help. It’s great. Today, though, something happened that made me question whether I should stop doing that. Long story short, I saw a tweet from a follower that made me feel bad for tweeting so much.

Now, okay, it’s not the end of the world if someone’s annoyed I tweet so much because they can just unfollow me. I know that. I just felt… I dunno, like I should apologise for it. Sigh.

So yes. Distinct lack of internet for me. Although I can actually tweet from my phone so it won’t help on that front. Lol fail.

Progress; minimal.

I should be far more excited about the plotline I have moved on to but I just can’t seem to get the words out. Today I’ve managed a measly 200 words at the time I wrote this entry, which is just pathetic. I’m going to try and get some more out within the next hour but I dunno, if I can’t get much more done before my buffer runs out I’m going to have to resort to writing challenges, methinks. Or skipping scenes, which I never like doing. Rofl, I have found myself forgetting stupid stuff, like the guns I gave Mana, the names of characters and places, that kind of thing. Sob.

I guess the situation with my ear doesn’t help matters. Yes it is still blocked, though now, no doubt because of my using the eardrops, rather than feeling blocked it feels… gunged up. It’s marginally preferable to it feeling like something solid is stuck in there but it feels pretty gross when I sneeze or cough or yawn… going to see if I can get an appointment with the GP to get it syringed because this is driving me bonkers.

Right. Turning the internet off for a while so I can get some words out. Sigh.

Oops.

I pretty much did nothing on my nano today, because I was so shattered. Woke up this morning and went to collect my gorgeous new sunglasses, as well as order some normal everyday glasses – I pretty much got something like my current glasses but like, only half-rims – and then we went to look at hoovers and then went to Morrisons or, as I like to call it, Hell. I am not even joking. There were people coughing all over the fresh produce without using their hand, let alone a tissue, there were people who didn’t wash their hands before leaving the restroom, and there were screaming children. You try telling me that isn’t hell and I will slap you. But anyway, came home and had a nap. Still shattered now and I’ve been awake since about 5.

However, I have plans to start a new subplot now that I’ve killed some characters Mana, my main character, has left the town of Ninora. Next, he meets a mysterious yet mischevous Coyote and comes upon Aelbeck, a town at the edge of a forest where it is said there are man-eating wolves. I think I’m going to enjoy writing this one, but that’s kind of what I said about Ninora and I ended up hating it with the burning passion of a thousand suns. I didn’t have the chance to prepare many notes for this so hopefully that’ll keep my excitement for this arc alive.

So since I’ve managed to creep past my daily target of 1667 words I’ve decided to talk about something totally unrelated to NaNo… almost. You’ll see what I mean in a bit.

So, people who know me know that I love to draw, but that I tend to fall into art slumps quite frequently when I convince myself my art is crap. Rofl. With normal people this would motivate them to improve so that they can look at their art and be proud of their skill and not think ‘whatever I do will be crap anyway’. Because of this, I do not have my own art ’style’, so to speak, and am constantly changing in order to find a style that I am actually happy with. Currently I am happy with the chibi style that I developed and also the colouring styles that I use (there are two I flit between, cell shading and blending, both are funtiems ) but I don’t like my actual drawing style itself, the way I draw people or characters. I don’t think I ever have been, really. So yeah, that results in me flitting between styles.

But no, this isn’t a pity-party for me wah wah wah-ing about how I hate my art. No, siree. I have decided to do something about it for a change! SO HERE’S THE DEAL.

I haven’t worked out exactly how this is going to work yet, but what I’m thinking of doing is having a post at this blog asking people to post if they’re interested in getting free art from me – which could be anything from a sketch to a fully coloured picture with background or even a scene. If you like it you will be free to use this art for your book covers or for websites or whatever, I’d love it if you’d add a little “cover illustration by…” thinger somewhere if you do. <3 There are two catches, I will need to be inspired. So I'll probably ask y'all to post or e-mail me an excerpt from your book of a scene or maybe the basic premise if you don't have anything specific in mind (which is how I work best, really) and I'll choose my favourites.

Nothing will be out of bounds in terms of normal people, werewolves, vampires, aliens, whatever, but note this will be EXPERIMENTAL. IE, probably nothing like the stuff on my deviantart gallery.

Anyway, I’ll be mulling this over and will make an actual post for this if and when I reach that magical 50,000 word mark! Good luck everyone!

Progress and excerpts!

Well, we’re fast approaching the end of week 1 of NaNo and I’m pretty chuffed with my progress to date. Speaking of, I added a couple of the proper NaNo widgets to the sidebar to show my current progress which will automatically change to reflect my updated word count (16k woo!), which is far easier than having to dick around with the old widget that I was using where I had to manually imput not only my word count and the day number, but the hours I wrote and scenes I got through, JUST SO IT WOULD SHOW UP. So yeah, woo for easy!

Anyway, finally getting to the end of my first subplot, and will soon be starting on the next… obviously. I was beginning to hate the first one and seriously just wanted to use the “rocks fall, everyone dies” method of dealing with my ever-growing hatred, but I powered through. Thank God, because it gave me a hefty chunk of words to add to my wordcount, woo! I’ll probably just cut it all later and put it down to my ‘getting to know my main character’, so to speak.

One more thing, I recently added an excerpt to my nano profile so I figured I’d post what I added there, over here. ;D I was actually really happy with how I started the novel, and this is still my favourite scene from everything I’ve written so far. It’s probably more like a prologue than a chapter, and basically sets the relationship between Mana, the main character, and Shino, his travelling companion who also happens to be a talking chinchilla. Anyway, I’m going to add that to the page I’ve set up for this year’s nano which is located right here at this handy-dandy link!

Uh, I forgot to make a Day One post. Fail. Anyway, day one went quite well, actually. Managed to crank out about 4k words (most of which is utter shite, sob) and an currently working towards 8k by the time I roll into bed. This is made harder by the fact that I have a blocked ear. Again. So yeah, had to pilfer monies from Mum and wander down to the chemist to get some olive oil eardrops. It’s just an irritating distraction because I literally cannot hear out of the left side and I can FEEL it’s blocked and it’s ick.

Anyway, going to keep on truckin’. *thumbs up*