Tag Archives: NaNoWriMo

Performance Artist

09 Wednesday May 2018

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This is one of the poems from my recent NaPoWriMo experiment. I hope you enjoy it.

 
Performance Artist

I’m shy
I don’t want to talk to people
they seem so much more legitimate than me

I’m uncomfortable
my legs don’t sit nicely when I cross them
because of my massive thighs

I ate luke-warm, oily Bolognese
scoffed it down before heading
into this room full of arty types

The book I brought to write in is massive
it takes up too much room
it’s not spiral bound

but it does have a shiny pink metallic cover
and was a present from my Kris Kringle at work
colour and writing, my two obvious features

I’ve only got four business cards with me
which seems like an oversight now
I have hundreds at home, where they’re of no use

Take a deep breath. It will be fine.
Stick out your hand and introduce yourself.

Hello 2018!

01 Monday Jan 2018

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I’m writing this a few days early because I’m going to a music festival over New Years. If you’ve read my Reflections on 2017 you’ll know that I’ve had a pretty productive year.

There were some ups and downs, especially this last week around Christmas. It’s always a weird time when people go away, have family commitments and there’s sort of nothing to do. It sounds relaxing but I find it hard.

My family lunch was good, my grandmother was mostly inoffensive. I was given a hammock and stand which I’m taking to the festival – it’s books in the hammock in the morning and music in the afternoon.

What are my goals for this year then, I hear you asking. Well, here they are:

  1. Win NaNoWriMo 2018
  2. Enter 5 writing competitions
  3. Redraft ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ and publish it online (from 2017)
  4. ‘Fleur & Alexandra are Out of This World’ Melbourne Fringe Festival Show
  5. Edit ‘The Discovery of the Franklin’
  6. Submit ‘My Mothers Secret’ and ‘We Can’t Have Nice Things’ to publishers
  7. Perform with the new band regularly
  8. Two blogs per month

The big one in terms of time commitment is the Fringe Show. The show I did last year was a six-months-long intense project. We’ve already started work on the new show; we have a plot and we’re ready to start drafting the script. We’re already way ahead of where we were last time.

I’m also considering entering a self-published box set with a contemporary romance story of ~25k words. I think I could use the project I did for NaNoWriMo in 2017 for this, so that will be another job to put on the list if I commit to it.

I’m thinking of taking some evening acting classes. I’m a pretty confident performer and there is always room for learning and improvement.

On top of these goals I will do my best to make time for exercise, good eating, friends , live music and all that other normal stuff.

My blog activity over the last year has been a bit slack. I’m going to aim for two posts per month, but I also want to have good content. If I don’t have anything good to post, I won’t put anything up, but with all the projects I’m working on, I’m sure I’ll have material.

As always, 2017 had it’s highs and lows. It’s time to close that door, learn what I can and move into the next phase. I hope next year I’ll be in a more stable place and that stability enables me to create more consistently.

All the best for the new year. Bring it on 2018!!

 

Sixth Time Lucky

02 Saturday Dec 2017

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This year I finished my NaNoWriMo on 28 November. My final word-count was 50,336 words.

The working title of my new book is ‘The Discovery of the Franklin’.Cover mockup
I mocked-up this cover while procrastinating doing my words one day.

The story is contemporary fiction with romantic elements. The main characters are sisters, Sarah and Katie Franklin, hence the title.

It needs a bit of work to make it a proper book; I ‘pantsed’ the plot.

As well as NaNoWriMo, November was a time of moving away from creative endeavours which weren’t serving me. I decided it was time to leave the band that I’d been playing with. I’m  jamming with some new people, so we’ll see where that goes.

I also decided to stop going to my weekly writing workshop. The criticism that I got from the workshop group, and from the teacher, really demotivated me. I tried to take it on board and incorporate it, but it was never enough. Criticism, like art, can be extremely subjective.

I have a lot of creative energy which wants to get out, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to expend it on stuff which isn’t bringing me joy. Things don’t have to last forever, and I’ve changed as I’ve gotten older.

Now I’m going to work on setting my new year goals, and take stock of whether I’ve achieved last year’s.

Get the coffee pot ready

29 Sunday Oct 2017

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It’s that time again, the lead up to NaNoWriMo. Each November hundreds of thousands of writers around the world commit to writing, the goal is to write a 50k word novel over the month, but writers can approach it however it suits them. I’ve done this month long writing sprint five times already (and I got 50k words each time). Talk about glutton for punishment, am I right?

Nanowrimo

It’s only a few days away and I haven’t got a story idea yet. I’m thinking maybe

more of a family saga than the relationship focused stories I’ve done in the past. I’ll put a romance into it, because I like that sort of thing, but the family dynamics is where my interest is at the moment.

A couple of times over the last month I’ve had conversations with people about my writing. I’ve told them them I have five novel length manuscripts in varying states of polish. Four of these have been submitted to traditional publishers but so far no one has chosen to pick them up.

Sometimes it feels hard to explain to people that I’m a writer when I haven’t had my stories published. I feel like they look at it as a badge of worth. Other writers, of course, understand that if is incredibly difficult to have your writing picked up by a traditional publisher. J.K. Rowling, famously, had eleven publishers reject Harry Potter, and Virginia Woolf published herself.

I know my work is developing and my style is becoming more clear with every project I do. People I’ve shown my work to have responded positively, but occasionally I have doubts. I’ve put a lot of hours into writing in the last six so years. It’s been a labour of love; I do it because, as tortured as the process can be sometimes, I like having written. I like that I’m a writer.

Whether I make it to being an ‘author’ with a traditionally published book remains to be seen. I’ll continue to write novels, and maybe only five people with ever read them. But maybe I’ll find an audience and it will make a difference to someone’s life.

For now, I’ll put the coffee pot on and get down to business. I’ll have to say no to social outings, because for the next month I need to write at least 1700 words a day. And I’ll do it, because I’m stubborn like that. You can follow my progress here. See you on the other side.

Productivity Hacks – What are yours?

18 Monday Sep 2017

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Yesterday I was at the monthly Melbourne Romance Writers’ Guild meeting. We had special guest Anna Campbell come to speak to us about writing through the fear. Anna is a full time writer and she had a lot of great tips for making the most of your writing time.

One of the things which really stood out for me was the use of a productivity diary. It can be anything, but it’s somewhere to record the work you’ve done on your writing. One of the other participants suggested using Excel and the nerd in me was very excited. After the meeting I came home and made a spreadsheet:

Writing Tracker pic

It’s pretty simple, but it’s a way to keep you grounded about how much you’re actually producing. Anna said she was always surprised by how much she wrote when she looked back over her productivity diary. She said that a lot of her struggles with writing are based around ‘demons’ who tell her she isn’t good enough. Having a record of the writing she did over the month means she can tell the demons to get stuffed. I don’t know if it’ll work for me, but I’ll give it a try.

I’ve also started to think about what to do for NaNoWriMo this year. I’m going to use Lauren Clarke’s The Novel Handbook which I bought from her at the Romance Writers of Australia conference in mid-August. I found that with my last manuscript I was struggling to keep the characters straight in my head, to remember their eye colours, favourite foods etc. A story bible (try this one) like the productivity diary,  can be in whatever format suits you, but the purpose is to keep character, setting, and plot stuff handy so that you can refer to it.

As I was going through editing the manuscript I realised that I’d changed the names of three different minor characters. I got to a section, fairly late in the novel, and thought ‘Who is George?’ He was the main character’s father, originally named Ben. There were also two Renees.

The phrase ‘be ruthless in protecting your writing time’ has come up a number of times over the last month for me, and it’s really brought home the need for me to be disciplined. I’m good at sprinting, doing a lot of work over a relatively short period of time, but I haven’t developed a good sustainable pattern. I’ve blocked out Monday’s in my calendar for writing, and I am going to be ruthless about not booking other things during that time.

I’m going overseas at the start of October for three weeks. I’m taking a laptop with me so I hope that I’ll make some time to write. I’m going to take my Choose Your Own Adventure story with me; I’d like to have that edited by the time I get home. It might be fun just to put that up on the internet for people to read.

What are some of your techniques for squeezing out more writing time? Making use of dead time, not falling down a Netflix/YouTube hole, and doing short bursts, even if they’re only ten minutes, were all ways that I thought I might be able to scrounge some more time for writing.

Welcome to 2017

01 Sunday Jan 2017

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Firstly, can I just say that 2017 seems like an absurd number for a year. I finished school in 2002 and that felt quite strange but now I’m even older and it’s 2017. It’s not a real number, it’s not a real year. I feel very old.

But back to what I was really going to talk about. My new years post. I brought in the new year watching the fireworks over the city and got home after 5am from a lovely house party with a spa and lots of lovely people. As a result I’ve spent today alternately sleeping and binge-watching Sherlock. It’s been a good way to start 2017.

So what goals am I setting myself for this year? Well, to start with I’m getting rid of the vague goals from last year. ‘Eat Better’ and ‘Exercise More’ are so ill-defined that they really don’t allow me to succeed at them; so they’re out.

One of the new writing groups I’ve been attending recently is the Melbourne Romance Writers Guild, and the members are quite active in entering competitions and submitting pieces. I think it would help me to pitch got publication if I had won some competitions, so I’m going to add that to my specific goals for the year.

For my writing projects here is my list:

  1. Win NaNoWriMo 2017
  2. Enter 5 writing competitions
  3. Finish the first draft of ‘My Mother’s Secret’
  4. Redraft ‘You Brought this on Yourself’ for submission (this is a hangover from 2016)
  5. Redraft the Choose Your Own Adventure and publish it online.

That’s probably enough for the year, if I’m honest. I think I will need to rewrite the first two NaNoWriMo manuscripts I wrote for publication, they don’t quite sit in the genre of romance well enough to be commercial and they’re not literary fiction either. That’s probably too much to do this year, so they can go on the list for 2018 along with another fringe show. I did a fringe festival show last year, and it was a fantastic experience, but it took up a lot of my creative mind. I think I’d like to do it again, but perhaps every second year is more sustainable.

For my performance goals this year I’m going to focus on Hello Volume. We’ve had a couple of gigs this year and I’d love to be able to get one gig a month in 2017. We’ll need to do some work on networking as well as merchandising and social media presence and all of that jazz. But there’s four of us so that’s doable.

I need to take a bit better care of myself this year. By the time we got to the end of 2016 I was pretty stressed, exhausted and unhappy. I’d let friendships drop off and was anxious about a lot of things. Things that will help to make my 2017 awesome include cooking good food at home, keeping up with regular exercise, reading, and spending time with friends.

I wish you all a brilliant year in 2017. May it bring you adventures and love and happiness and just the right amount of challenge.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

05 Monday Dec 2016

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I realised today that I hadn’t done a blog post to brag about my NaNoWriMo win this year! So here it is!

I finished my 50,027 word draft on 29 November. I took the next day off. I have not written any more since, it’s  been nearly a week.

I think I’m a bit over halfway through the story – I keep adding extra details and obstacles into my plot – so I think I have about 30,000 words left. I’m not great at guessing these things but that sounds right. I’ve given myself a deadline of 14 February, coz that’s romantic and stuff. And I work better with a deadline, arbitrary or otherwise.

About half way through the month I mocked up a cover image and title for the new manuscript because I was procrastinating writing a scene.

Behold My Mother’s Sectret:cover-jpg

I have a bunch of editing work that needs to be done on my third and my fourth NaNoWriMo manuscripts as well as possibly rewriting the first two to be more in line with genre conventions. I think I’ll have plenty of work to keep myself busy over the summer.

We also had a great gig for Hello Volume this Sunday at the Workers Club, so we hope to have a bunch more of those before the summer is over.

It’s a good thing I don’t work full-time or else I’d never have time to sleep. Keep motivated!

Why do I do it?

31 Monday Oct 2016

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I’m in Sydney for a few days giving myself a little holiday, visiting a couple of cool people. I told my friend, a poet, that I was feeling a little anxious about starting NaNoWriMo without a plot, or any characters. She laughed, and asked “why do you do it?”

This year will be my fifth time. I couldn’t think of a good reason at the time, and after thinking it over I don’t really have one, except I do it because I can.

There is something that I get from forcing myself to do the marathon that I don’t get from writing on my own. Additional motivation that comes from the companionship of other people doing the same thing. I don’t think I’d achieve nearly as much without knowing hundreds of thousands of people around the world are doing it too. There’s also an element of competition against myself; chasing those daily word count goals. Without that I wouldn’t make time for writing.

I am aware I create quite a lot of content, and I do the most of it at the last minute, right on the deadline. I think, deep down, I’m lazy and having something external to push against really helps me. And knowing there is a time when it will be finished, has to be finished, really helps sustain my efforts. Having the end in sight makes it easier to just keep going that little bit longer. A preset time when you have to stop also helps to avoid perfection paralysis.

This morning, I sat in a coffee shop in Newtown, with a coffee and wrote 600 words of plot and character summaries. I think I probably have enough to start with. Probably my plot has holes in it I won’t notice until later, but I can fix that up later. I start writing tomorrow.

Expect a couple of updates before the month is over, and possibly a faux-cover reveal later in the month when I’m procrastinating doing my daily words.

Continuous Improvement

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

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The day job that I have at the moment is working in Quality. That means that I spend all day reviewing, rewording and proof reading policies, and doing what’s referred to as continuous improvement. It’s my first job in Quality and I don’t have a strong background in it, but I think continuous improvement comes from manufacturing.

My birthday was last week, I turned 32. I don’t know how to feel about it. One of my gifts, from my family, was to pay for a writing short course. My mum was worried that I would take the course as a criticism,  that’s not a helpful way to look at learning.

So we looked at a few options and I have enrolled in a course starting tomorrow. I’m hoping to get a few things out of it.

  1. New perspectives. The feedback that I’ve been getting from one of the writing groups I’m in has started to feel like the same stuff every time.
  2. New contacts. Writing can be a solitary pursuit and it’s always good to meet people who do the same thing you do. Networking is always good. People who share that passion and can help to reignite the fire.
  3. New techniques. I’ve done a couple of short courses in creative writing before, but this new course will be five hours a week for ten weeks. That’s 50 hours at least of concentrated writing time. I’m sure there will also be homework.
  4. Renewed enthusiasm. I’m probably still coming out of the post-Fringe slump, but I’m feeling a bit lacklustre. Hopefully fresh  faces will spur me on.

The course also runs over November, NaNoWriMo time. This year I am planning to do it again. Perhaps I’ll be able to workshop the structure and plot with the class. I think my plot and character development would probably benefit from a more structured approach.

I don’t have an idea or story yet, but perhaps I’ll try to stick more closely to a genre than I have in the past. I’m also kind of obsessed with crime at the moment, in TV and podcasts, and maybe I’ll bite the bullet (if you’ll pardon the pun) and write a crime novel.

I’ve been reluctant to do crime because of the research involved, but maybe I can get most of it out without needing to get deep into research mode. Otherwise I’ll probably go back to romance, which is where most of my other stories have been. I’d also like to do young adult some time. So many possibilities!

I hope this course be an opportunity to consolidate the things I already know, and to learn some new things. I hope to meet some cool new people and get inspired by them. But I also hope that prioritising my writing, setting aside time specifically to work on it, will provide the motivation and stamina I’ll need to get through NaNoWriMo one more time!

I want this journey to be one of continuous improvement: always learning, always curious. A journey where I can learn from, and be inspired by others and where I can also teach and inspire others.

Back to Reality

26 Monday Sep 2016

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My fringe show is finished. We finished packing up the venue today. Now I have to deal with the flatness that comes with having finished a project. Something that I’ve poured so much energy and emotion and time into is all over. I don’t think we’ll revive the show, which is a little weird in itself. We have some photos coming soon, and then the whole thing will just be a memory.

I feel like I have all this space in front of me and it’s sort of overwhelming – mental space and space in my calendar for getting back into other writing projects and to get back to social obligations (and sleep) that I’ve been shirking in favour of the show.

Pre-show selfie – Fleur (r) and Alexandra (l) preparing to save the world.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped with the show, Alex my co-star and co-writer, Chris for production assistance, Leisa for technical assistance, Chris (the other one) for prop design, and Stuart for bump in and bump out.

I want to thank all of my friends and family who never doubted me for a moment and who never once told me it was a bad idea. I want to thank every single person who came along and made the show the success it was. Thank you for coming to see me, and for braving the wilds of Collingwood to find the venue (which was not easy, I know).

Every night we had a different challenge to overcome – whether it be black outs, or doors not locking, or my computer having a little attack right before show time. Doing a fringe festival show has been an exercise in creativity, ingenuity, abstract problem solving and treading the fine line between excitement and stress.

I certainly feel like I have the performance bug now, so I’m going to channel that into the band, and get my writing mojo back on track. Gotta keep this momentum going baby! NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, I don’t have any ideas yet, but I have time right?