FINISHED! Another Successful Year

I FINISHED MY NANOWRIMO STORY! I really did not expect the word count to go higher than sixty thousand words but I finished, and I couldn't be happier. It's well over ninety thousand words, but when I finally go back and edit I will most likely throw out a lot of things I added in for the sake of word count.

I guess I can either inquire with editors for the stories I want to self publish, or I cna go and start working on book two in my New Adult series, and it won't follow the same heroine, each book is a different character's story.

Reign Chosen

New Reign! The series is just getting darker!

NaNoWriMo Pep Talk from Marie Lu

So during the month of NaNoWriMo we get emails from published authors. This one that I am posting is one of my favorite pep talks from NaNoWriMo from New York Times best selling author Marie Lu the author of a dystopian series Legend, the books are Legend, Prodigy, and Champion.

Hey Wrimos,

You’re past the halfway mark. Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and you can see the faintest glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. But you can barely breathe. Your brain feels sore. Things might be getting a little rough, right?

I’m not going to give you inspirational words. I’m not going to tell you how hard it is to be a writer or how courageous you are to be doing this (which you are, by the way, didn’t you know that already?). You don’t have time for all that—you’re trying to finish a novel! Today, I’m going to give you some practical tips on how to make it through the third week. The dark swamp. The mines of writer’s block.

Pull your favorite, tattered, dog-eared book off the shelves. Find a chapter that leaves you breathless. Start typing it out in a new document, word for word. Don’t just type blindly; think about what you’re writing. For me, something about this exercise helps me see the genius in the other writer’s storytelling, and will stimulate my own writing and thoughts. Be careful, of course, that you don’t end up plagiarizing it right into your novel… but there’s something to be said for drawing inspiration from another.

Write a long list of all your characters. Then, start drawing random lines connecting random characters to each other. Don’t think—just connect. Afterward, look down at your page. Try to figure out a connection between each of the two random characters you just linked—something scandalous, maybe, or something sweet. Something three-dimensional and unexpected. Some explosive scene that throws the two together.

Turn to a different creative venture. This is the point in NaNoWriMo when you start feeling exhausted, which makes you lazy, which makes your storytelling lazy. Words might not be inspiring you anymore. So turn to writing’s creative cousins. Art. Music. Games. And so on. I personally will draw my characters. You can do the same, even if you don’t usually draw or you don’t want to draw your characters. Take 10 minutes and make a map of your world, even if you’re writing contemporary. Where’s the post office? What’s the layout of this house? What places do your characters love to visit? Draw a random box in the corner. Make that a secret/forbidden/abandoned place. A love hotel. A bar with a hidden basement.

Turn to music: make a playlist of music that matches the mood of your story. Don’t just play it back, either—plug in some good headphones, close your eyes, sit back, crank the volume, and get lost. Play the scenes of your story out in your head. Imagine the lyrics matching your story. Listen to the story arc inherent in the song. Go to where your characters are. Somewhere in the darkness, you might see the spark of a scene.

Of course, none of this can trump the ultimate, time-worn advice:

Just Keep Going.

Write an entire monologue with your main character if you have to. Spend a chapter just exploring the life story of an antagonist. Write a scene with nothing but dialogue between your hero and your villain. Write a steamy love scene between your favorite couple. They don’t have to be scenes in chronological order. They don’t even have to end up in your book. But they will help you to keep going.

So keep going. You’re almost there. Just a little more. You are stubborn. You are exhausted. You are determined. You are a Writer.

Marie

Update

So not including the scenes I typed up in a separate document for me to add into my story later during the revision process, I have so fat typed up approximately 30,000 words. Which is really not bad considering how busy I've been with the amount of work my statistics and anatomy class have been pilling up on my.


While I have been working on that I am also in the process of self publishing two of my trilogies next year. I'm hoping I can maybe get the first book of both of them out by February. I queried both of them to agents and publisher, both with flat out rejections. I even mentioned how on one of the trilogies all the manuscripts were complete because I know how now publishers are looking for authors who can get them more than one book a year. Sadly, all gave me the same responses.

The second trilogy I wrote I completed book one, and got half of book two completed. I worked too hard on these stories to just leave them sitting on my flashdrive for another ten years until the trends died down. It was mostly the elements that got the agents down, but the stories were really unique and like nothing ever seen before. I showed the first five chapters to several of my professors and they really like them. So I'm looking to self publish them. If I do self publish them, I'll keep you posted.