Tuesday, December 8, 2009

It's been a month

Actually - I thought it was longer. I really need to get back into it, I have been bad. I just lost my motivation completley. MUST DO IT!

Monday, November 9, 2009

The opening

I have decided to post up a little liny bit of my story. Actually, it's something I just wrote and hasn't been edited, but I am making a prelude to the story because, well basically, I need it to be longer.

Anyway - I will probably go and chage this a lot, but so far - this is the NEW opening:


The warmth of the evening wind swept through the mall as people went about their evening shopping with the usual banal joys and frustrations of life. The gust brought with it dust of the construction that was a constant in the city and smells and sounds from the traffic that choked its streets.

A child cried for his mother momentarily before being swept up in the woman’s arms and carried off. A cyclist twisted around cars and pedestrians carrying ingredients for his meagre dinner in a plastic bag hung off the rusty handle of his bike. A young lady sat shaking her boot covered foot and looking at her watch with a nervous glint in her eyes and wayward teens looked trouble and cheep DVDs of foreign movies. Beyond the attention of these and the other hundred people who populated this strip of gaudy shops, two dark figures stood facing one another.

One stood on the far northern end, near a stone carving of five horses ever leaping from their stone cage but never moving, the other, on the southern end near an old beggar who tried in vain to hail the attention of passersby with less and less success as the years past. People passed between the two still figures, but they never lost sight of one another and, although they were more than one hundred and fifty metres from each other, they carried on a conversation no louder than a whisper.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Lul in the writing

I haven't written much until today, when I decided to MAKE myself. I went back to do some editing and solved with just a sentence or two a huge polt problem that had been brewing for some time.

So, it's going well again, although the word count has gone down if anything (editing will do that) but at least I can go on without the dark cloud of unbelievable story hanging over my head.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Lul in the action

I'm at 36,559 (2095 words today)

Of course all stories have lulls. The bits I'm writing don't sound very creative at the moment. They are just words and not images.

Sometimes I pause to think about how it sounds and go back to make it pretty, but a lot of the time I am just getting to story out.

I am sure that it will be a labour of love to go back on make this great story beautiful in it's expression. Crafting the images, and bringing the reader along WITH the emotion is important to me.

Some ideas that really mesh well have popped out of my brain tonight, and I have enjoyed writing them down.

it's a good day today. Goodnight.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Twitter; you follow HOW MANY people? (NWR)

It's OK if I blog about something other than my writing right? (NWR - Not Writing Related)

I need just say, what is the point in following 54,000 people on Twitter? I see these huge numbers on people's twitter accounts and when I find a famous person, I don't blink when I see that 300,000 follow them, but when I see that anyone follows more than a few hundred people I start to wonder how they could possibly find Twitter useful with the volume of tweets that would be coming though.

Face it, the truth is you really CAN'T follow more than a few hundred (For me personally more than 50 would be crazy) because you are not actually following them. Sure they're coming through your feed and perhaps you're even casting your eye over some every now and then but the mental filter for stuff that's important has to kick in at some point and your eyes skip over the ones you're not interested in.

If you follow 1000 people who each tweet once a day, you're getting 41 tweets per hour of the day. If you sleep for even 6 of those hours, you're getting 62 tweets every WAKING hour. About 1 per minute.

If you however follow 54,475 people (like Stephen Fry does... but am sure many others with similar numbers) and every person tweets once a day you're getting about 5 tweets every 6 seconds. It takes about a second to read a tweet so that's all you would ever have time to do.

So lets face it, YOU don't follow that many people, your account does. It's nice and all - and having lots of followers is a great thing...

but if someone who follows over 1000 people already decided to follow me as well, I wouldn't be that flattered.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The title of my blog

I wanted to explain the title of my blog 'eighty thousand words'.
This is my word count goal for this novel. When I reach the 80,000 mark, if I still have more story to tell, then I'll be stoked and keep writing, but if I run out of story before achieving 80,000 then I'll be super sad.
If I hit it first go within 5%... well then I’ll do a jig.

The wise internet (which is never wrong???) has told me from various sources that 80 thow is the magic number for a first time novelist. So that's the number I am going for.

Maybe it seems cold to just be aiming at a number, but it's useful for me to have that kind of clear goal and to watch myself get closer and closer to it every day. Actually, if I didn't have it, I may have given up by now.

And I’m not just aiming at a number. I want to make the elements of my story exciting, flow well, characters fit together with realistic motivations and goals... but I am not going to tell the world what interesting plot hurdle I just conquered because that would be FOOOOOLISH.

Over the hump

I feel like I am over the hump right now. It's 2:50 am and tonight alone I wrote 1612 words. That's in 3 hours or so. That's WITH distractions of TV shows.

The pace is NOTHING like the pace I was keeping at the beginning of the project where I could put down 3000 words in a day. That would be hard to match these days especially because there are threads I need to be careful of, and everything needs to fit together now. Still, the best thing about the effort tonight is that it's all new; I'm actually writing new words at the very end of my document. I feel good about that.

Now that I’m on the other side of the hump... it should be easier to fall into a higher word count for a few days before I come to the next hump.

I’ll try to do 2000 tomorrow.

People reading the draft

I was really concerned about people reading my unfinished work for a while. Of course I got my husband to read the bits I loved from the second week of writing, but recently a friend asked if I could send him what I had done so far.

I really didn’t know whether to say yes. If he wasn’t such a good friend I may have said no actually. But since then I have also asked my husband to read it all (the first 28000 words) and he’s ½ way through and loving it. It’s really inspiring to have people read what I have done and give me good feedback – even if it is my husband (although he is pretty honest with me and tells me which parts make no sense.)

But maybe this is premature? I am under half way done and I am still having trouble pushing forward rather than perfecting what I have got. I have had a fairly good day today, but I am worried that when both husband and friend have finished reading the bit I gave them I will be more inclined to edit again rather than continue forward.

Perhaps I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Who cares?

I'm about to break the 30,000 word barrier and I am still not sure if anyone will care; about my characters, my story, the two months of effort I have put in so far.

When I started this project I did so in a rush of inspiration. I wanted to read a really good novel in my genre of choice, but I couldn’t find one. I was disappointed a number of times by the TV shows and movies I was watching that sanitised the subject matter for teen audiences and I didn’t want that for my story.

But limiting the readership to adults – catering for something that I would like and not really caring to begin with whether others would like it – that feeling has well and truly worn off. Now, in my second month of writing, I really DO hope that others enjoy what I am writing, enough firstly to consider publishing it and secondly to enjoy reading it.

Is it a gamble to strictly use the metric system when describing distance? E.g. “His face was centimetres from the glass”. Or to set my story not in some fictional city, but very specifically an Australian city (even down to searching out reference photos and referring to Google maps) and NOT even Sydney, the only one anyone else in the world knows about.

There are a lot of things about the story so far than an editor could change. Heck, they might like to change lots of things, but there are little choices like those above that are important to me.

I have the kind of personality which craves acceptance so will I be able to deal with the rejection of publishers or the indifference of the public? Let’s hope so.

Or better yet, let's hope people DO actually care!

Pink Moto