Yuuko's writing blog

Write the first sentence of a story about a birth. Now write the first sentence about a death. Then invent your own pairs.

Birth and death
There was no way they’d get me into that delivery room, no matter how much they wanted me to see the wonder of birth as my new baby brother came into the world; there were some things a guy doesn’t ever need to see.

The first person to discover the body was a young paper boy, having taken an unfortunate shortcut through the still-dark backalleys and suddenly flying off at speed as his wheel caught on her discarded, crimson-stained stiletto heel shoe.

Write five of your own opening lines for five stories.

I swore and kicked my car, which was as dead as the zombies that lurched towards me, except that there was little chance of this piece of junk somehow being reanimated.

My parents are probably the only people who could argue so ferociously over when to have pork for dinner.

My bedside clock blinked 3:33am when I sat bolt upright in bed, cold sweat soaking my nightgown causing it to cling to my skin uncomfortably as I struggled to control my shivering.

“Quit your moaning, already,” Jess snapped as she pulled the bullet out of her would-be rescuer’s arm, “I said I was sorry!”

In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the smartest idea to break into a vampire coven, especially as she’s a walking buffet to the creatures with extra enhanced senses.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t write nearly as much as I should do, so I’m extremely rusty. I used to write a heck of a lot of fanfiction – don’t laugh! – which had me writing to something resembling a schedule mostly because I liked the fact that I was getting comments. Eventually that novelty wore off and the fandoms that I had once been utterly in love with didn’t have such a hold on me anymore, resulting in very scant updates and the eventual abandonment of the older of the two stories I was still writing. I feel sad about that, to be honest, as I so loved writing those stories.

But back to the subject at hand, I have decided to at least try and write something on a daily basis, whether it’s prose or poetry or just a blog post about something inconsequential. To help me, I got my hands on two books (What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers and The Pocket Muse: Ideas and Inspiration for Writing, the latter of which is a ridiculously pretty book) with some writing exercises and tips for people who want to try and get into the habit of writing daily.

Wish me luck!

EDIT TO ADD: I suppose this would also include having character interviews and the like. That sounds kind of fun!

I came here fully ready and prepared to post something intelligent and insightful or groundbreaking about the nano experience or to share some details about my idea for this year, and accidentally started watching The Expendables instead. Needless to say, for the past hour that I’ve been watching this movie the most coherent thought in my head has been “SQUEEEEEE~” with “OH MY GOD THIS IS AWESOOOOOOOOME!!!!” coming a close second. Either way… not so much with the intelligence.

Did I mention I absolutely adore Jet Li and Jason Statham? Yeah. See, the sight of Jet Li weilding a machine gun on the back of a pickup truck rendered me pretty much speechless.

EDIT: And may I also say that the Bromance levels in this movie are ridiculous. <333

Last year was my first attempt at NaNoWriMo so I honestly had no idea what to really expect nor did I know how best to prepare, although I’d read numerous handy blog posts with awesome suggestions. I guess that sort of contributed to my eventual dislike of the end product although I did pass the 50k mark, which I was immensely proud of at the time. I suppose in order to post about what I learned from the experience I’ll have to post about what happened, so here’s a little flashback.

Nano 2009 actually very nearly didn’t happen for me, mostly because after having watched and cheered on my friends in 2008 I signed up in December with all the will in the world to try my hand at and own nano 2009. Unfortunately as the months wore on I totally forgot about it and the ideas I’d had, which means that by the time October rolled by I had done absolutely no preparation work… mostly because I didn’t even have an idea. I managed to get some ideas written down and eventually decided on one to work on so that by the time the first of November actually came along I had some characters and something almost resembling an outline to work with.

The first of November quickly rolled by and I began feverishly writing my novel, the excitement of taking part along with my enthusiasm for my plot and characters driving me forward. Then I started suffering the normal symptoms of the nano experience; slowing down, lack of enthusiasm for the plot/characers/writing, not being able to just write. Add to that the fact that I hadn’t yet learned to turn my inner editor off so I was constantly going back and correcting or changing things (much like I’ve been doing with this blog post, lol). As the days wore on I kind of learned to ignore it… but only a little. By week 3 I’d been meeting the daily targets with some ease but, as I had been fearing, I had also gone through the outline that I’d prepared and as I still had about 10k left to do I started to panic instead of, I dunno, sitting down for a bit and noting down possible plots.

I did eventually get to 50k (just) and was super happy but, as mentioned, I never wanted to see it ever again, which is a shame since I started out loving it. I suppose it was naive of me to think that my first ever nano would go smoothly, but it was a bit disappointing, and I only have myself to blame for that, really.

So what have I learned? Well;

Have a plot – Okay, so we all have a plot for nano, but what I mean is have a complete plot. I had a premise and fragments of a plot but didn’t really have an end goal in sight which is why I kept getting stuck or kept writing myself into a corner. I’d mostly banked on just writing short stories as I went along rather than having one plot to be resolved at the end of the novel.

Know your characters – this should probably go without saying, really… In my defence I did know my characters well but didn’t know them well enough to know how they’d react if they were thrown into certain situations or encountered unexpected perils. This meant I couldn’t just throw a random event in and see what happened without getting horrendously stuck.

Preparation is key, mofo – yeah, I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t do nearly enough preparation on my novel. I barely had 2 weeks to get things done and that’s clearly nowhere near enough time to get to know the plot and characters or to let everything develop and grow before the writing started. So this year I’ve started early, I’m doing character sheets (which I should have done last year), having a premise that has a beginning, middle and end, and mapping out character relationships and the like. I’m sure I’ll do more but at least I’m giving myself time to think of things!

Join in on the forums – I’ve been lurking the forums and have realised how fun it probably is to post there. So yes, this year I will post moar.

Don’t take it so seriously, dude – I took last year waaaaay too seriously. No dares, sprints, adopting subplots/twists for me! I guess eventually without something fresh my plot began to get stagnant in my mind because I was being so SRS about nano and refusing to let anything fun interrupt my SRS writing time… I mean damn, self, it’s meant to be fun. Loosen up and enjoy the experience!

“Self-loathing is not a fucking character-builder. It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t make you better. It’s just an ever-deepening, creepy-ass trap; a trap that is a huge moneymaker for corporations that do not have and never will have good intentions. You’re not disgusting. You’re not freakish. You’re not ugly. And you’re never going to be perfect. And holy shit, that is so okay.”

So I’m a dumbass. I know how hard that is to believe but it’s true, for many reasons. This particular case, however, is connected to this here blog.

This blog was actually all nice and finished and had plenty of posts from last year’s nanowrimo, but then after it was all over my brain decided to take a long break from thinking about it. So a couple of months ago I was on my web-hosting account and decided to clean up my long list of databases… I can already hear a few of you groaning. Yeah, I deleted the database for this blog, and I only realised when I came back wanting to post about this year’s nano only to find an error message about missing database connections. Sob.

So here I am, claiming that this is a fresh start and that it was totally planned. *whistle*

XD All failing aside, here’s to this year’s NaNoWriMo and hopefully NOT failing that!