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Progress!

I have made great strides in the last while. Today alone has been full of progress. I realized a large issue was that I was writing from no point of view. It was difficult because the story is about a particular character, but currently he is a baby and unlikely to know or understand what is happening around him. So I decided to pass the puck and whoever has the puck gets the point of view. It's National Novel Writing Month, so I hope to get as much written as possible. In order for it to be considered a novel, it must have at least 50,000 words. I am at 9,242/50,000, so only about 18 percent complete to hit the minimum. I know I shouldn't focus on that, but it can be helpful to have a target. I stumbled onto a blog post by author Justine Larbelestier about how to write a novel and well much of it I am going my own way for, the spreadsheet tip and discussion around balance between action and inaction, was very helpful. If not for this I probably would have continued not k

Another challenge that I have is...

... writing stuff I think needs to exist in my book, but isn't my strong point or what I'm interested in. Specifically, my characters have quite a literal journey ahead of them and although I have plenty of what I think are neat ideas, there are bits like their birthdays that I feel I should write about because I think my eventual readers will want it in the book. Maybe I'm way off the mark there and should just write what makes me happy and worry about that stuff when I get close to publishing or I may never get close to publishing... That's another thing. Do I self-publish? There are a lot of benefits to that and the old view of security in having a publisher marketing and distributing is becoming outdated. I've read several articles suggesting that many publishers today are not working too hard for the author. Perhaps I just need an editor, a website, and a marketing agent. I say just, but really that could be nearly as expensive or more expensive and may still

Challenge

I feel one of my biggest challenges as a writer to be creating dialogue. A lot of my book is written but there isn't enough dialogue. Once I finally get the dialogue down I keep analyzing whether or not it is witty, boring, etc. Then I wonder whether or not it is even something the character would say the way it has been said and/or whether or not what is being said is realistic. The next thing I ponder is whether or not I should be writing the dialogue at all if I'm unsure whether or not it is something the character would say. Part of me feels like I need to discover the characters just as my eventual readers will. Perhaps this is the one time that I should listen to my friend and "just write." Ciao R~

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to track the many hours of writing for my novels, short stories, and anything else I end up writing. I began my novel, Scion (formerly titled The Truth About Jacob) on May 15, 2010.  To date I have 46 what I would call publishable pages and a whole lot of other "stuff" that is written but isn't really readable yet, a collection of post-it scribbles and a mass of thoughts in my head about what I want the story to aim towards. I realize 46 pages does not seem like very much from then to now, but I am only able to write part-time as I also like to eat food and working pays for that. I have no intention to get into the meat of the novel here as I intend to publish it someday (hopefully sooner rather than later) and would like to play it close to my chest for now. It's basically in pre-alpha stage. Just know that it will be fictional and exciting, I hope. Also, I have a copyright already for it. Other than capturing quick updates from my t