Progress. A little, but progress nonetheless. I had a nice little back and forth convo in my head earlier and I sat down to write it and it’s totally gone. GRR…. plus I’m tired and I have a cold coming on so my brain is not working at capacity. Hoping I can recapture the spirit tomorrow. Oy. One day I will learn to take notes.
Word count ending today at 5994. I usually aim for about 9000 in a chapter so I have ~ 4K words to go. No big. Got a lotta story to tell.
So. I might possibly be a total dummy, but I pledged for 2011. The big one. The INSANE level. I know, I know. Oh my GAH. 350,000 words in 2011. I have to write 1000 words a day, every day for the next year to just skate by. Uh. What?
But it’s ME. I write a lot of words. Usually.
This means I have to get back to blogging but since I’m dumping my personal blog, I will be doing more reading/reviews and writing blogging. Which is just fine with me.
Trying to get into my daily writing groove now, instead of waiting until the New Year and trying to jump into it. I can’t remember what word count I started with but I know I got in at least 1000 words tonight, so #WIN.
One of the blogs I read has WIP (Work in Progress) Wednesday, where they talk about what projects they have on-going and how they’re coming. As everyone knows I am in what is supposed to be the final chapters of a serial fanfiction story. It will, eventually, end. Just… not where I originally thought. Oh well. Word count!
Count for today ends at 4840. Chapter is going very. slowly. GUH. I’m trying, folks! I promise!
Tomorrow is December 15th… that marks 16 days until the end of the year and the last hurrah for writing. It’s also the day that we make our pledges for the next year for Get Your Words Out. And I…..have no idea what I want to pledge for next year.
My saving grace this year was having two longish serial stories I’ve been working on. Add in a few other stories and I am just sliding in at 300K at the end of the year. I feel like I’d have to write my butt off to do the same next year as I have zero intention of writing AIWD all of next year, and I don’t have an NaNo to finish. I also don’t want to go back to counting blog posts since I’m no longer blogging. I do plan to do a Big Bang and some other challenges. Just not sure that I’ll write 300,000 more words next year.
So that makes me ponder what level I want to pledge. I don’t want to aim too low and way overshoot it. Or aim too high and totally bomb out. Even lowering my goal 100K would probably be workable. Maybe.
I can’t even believe it’s time to think about 2011 Writing Goals.
I still need to set 2011 Reading Goals and not suck at them. I don’t set aside enough time for reading. Once I start a good book I want to sit for 5 hours and read it. Either that or it takes me 3 weeks to piecemeal read a book. I did just get a bunch of books, though…………..
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Just… wow. I read this book in one day… couldn’t stop reading it! It’s like sitting in the mind of a 5 yr old as his world changes.
Told in 5 distinct parts, the story opens when Jack turns 5. Ma (and the room the live in) is his world. All Jack has ever known is Room. And Door and TV and table and Ma. He knows nothing of the world outside of an 11×11 square shed, a virtual prison for his 26 yr old mother. All he has ever known is what is inside the square. Everything on TV is not real. It’s pretend. It’s Outside. And Outside doesn’t really exist.
All day, everyday, Jack and Ma go through their schedules and routines. There’s breakfast and cartoons and then book reading and Phys Ed. There’s naptime and playtime and lunch and dinner and bed time. There’s also the Scream Game, where they yell as loudly as they can into the skylight. Jack doesn’t know that Ma hopes someone will hear them. There’s the game Ma plays at night, with flashing the lights on, off, on, off. Jack doesn’t know that Ma hopes someone will see it. There’s the reason Jack sleeps in the wardrobe, because at night Old Nick comes and the bed squeaks and Ma doesn’t want Him to see Jack.
There comes a time when Ma and Jack have to gather all of their courage, all of their strength, be scared but brave and attempt an escape. To do it, they have to trick old Nick, the man that kidnapped Ma when she was 19 and had held her captive for seven long years, through a still birth and years of abuse, a broken arm, rotting teeth, and the birth of Jack.
There’s a period of time after the escape– because they do make a daring escape– that Jack has to learn that his world is more than Ma, and Room and Meltedy Spoon and Rug and Table and Eggshell Snake. He has grandparents, a cousin, an Uncle, friends… an entire world that he never knew existed, called Outside. Outside was no longer a story or a fairy tale, it was real. It was an “Unlying”.
I really enjoyed Room! It took awhile to get used to Jack’s language but once I got it down I found him endearing and laughed at how well Emma Donoghue captured children’s literal understanding of the world. I was impressed with how well Ma cared for her child, made sure he was happy and healthy and adjusted as well as one could be while living in a 12ft square cube.
I wish I could have got some perspective from his mother, but seeing the story unfold through his eyes makes it that much more poignant. It really illustrates the resilience of children and how rapidly they adjust to change. I like to think that in some ways Jack was Ma’s reason for living and was an inspiration for her when they could finally leave Room. I also found it interesting how when they went back to Room, how small and different it seemed, compared to Outside. I inwardly applauded Jack for choosing Outside.
I’m. so. excited.
I’ve updated my word count with my sparse 17,709 words for the month of November (ehhh… low, but I’ve been suffering my constant crisis of I totally suck at this) and I came in at 296,940 for my 2010 total.
That puts me at 3,060 words remaining (99%) to hit my goal of 300,000 words for the year. Had I done NaNo, I would have knocked it out of the park. I will still exceed it, just not by as much as I would have, if I had another project.
I am really excited to be so close to meeting/exceeding the goal I set for this year. It’s almost time to decide if I am going to participate in 2011 and I’m not sure. AIWD is my only open project and nothing is really niggling at me…. but with nothing to shoot for, I’m afraid that that’s exactly what I’ll produce. I need something to work toward… so we’ll see, I guess. There are lower goals I can choose, and some multi project ones that I could aim for, so I probably won’t pick such a large number again because if I ever write another 60 chapter story, I will personally slap myself.
Anyway, just updating my word count for November and being very excited about it. AIWD is within a few chapters of ending. The ending actually keeps moving as I get better ideas on how to draw the story to a close. I think I have just made this story a part of my life and it’s such a habit that I kind of don’t want to let it go. At the same time I have story fatigue… I have been writing it for almost 2 years and it’s more soap opera and fanfic fantasy than a story by this point, whch is not where I want to take it but that’s how it unfolds in my mind, so… that’s how it’s coming out. I am kind of anxious to get back to making progress with my writing and not just typing because I know people are expecting an update.
Not doing well with my reading either but I am determined to get back into that habit. I love it, I just don’t make time for it and it’s been hard to find a great book that holds my attention, lately. The constant struggle, I suppose.
The Confession by John Grisham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An innocent man is days from execution. Only a guilty man can save him.
It’s been awhile since I read this book, but I wanted to make sure I got a review in on this one. I remarked to someone earlier today that I’d put this book in my list of most enjoyed of 2010. Grisham includes a high level of detail, specifically when he’s talking about the physical illness of his main character, Travis Boyette.
It seems that good old Travis just can’t seem to let an innocent young black football stud die for a crime that he says he committed. And while that’s all well and good, no one believes that Travis committed the crime. The local PD thinks they’ve got their man, and they’re about to execute him.
Enter Kansas minister Keith Schroeder, to whom Boyette makes his confession. Now it’s on his shoulders to see that Donte` Drumm doesn’t die for a crime that he didn’t commit. Grisham weaves a tale in which there is a concerted “beat-the-clock” effort which had me biting my nails and flipping pages with earnest.
I’m a diehard Grisham fan and have read just about everything that he’s written in the legal genre. While some have been weak, most have been entertaining. In my personal opinion, The Confession reads to me now like The Firm read to me way back when. Some call this book weak, and I just don’t agree. As much as a legal thriller can be suspenseful, this book held my attention with every word.
FINALLY a new book by Grisham. I love his legal thrillers. His last book, the Associate, was fantastic. After a few ‘off’ novels, he seems to be the Grisham of old with his last and now this current novel. Can’t wait to dig in. I’m at about Ch. 3 or 4, I can’t tell cause I am reading with my Kindle app on my iPhone… my fave way to read!
I wrote like, half a chapter and put the WIP away. I’m in another ‘my writing sucks and I don’t feel like improving it’ cycle. Took a break until November, and will try to pick it up again.
I’m also officially not doing NaNo. I don’t have any story ideas anyway. :( Boo. Where is my brain? I read some of my old stuff and I can’t even believe I wrote some of it. I feel like I couldn’t do the same today.
Blah.
Quick and dirty, this month. September word count – 26,778 words. That’s the end of Same Time Next Week, the most recent chapter of All I Wanna Do and the current chapter up through 9/29. No words from blogs were counted. I haven’t blogged in forever anyway.
This brings my word count total to: 279, 231 for the year, leaving 20, 769 left to hit 300,000 words for 2010.
Good job me! :D
Last night I finally finished Orange is the New Black, by Piper Kerman. I don’t typically read non fiction but the subject matter really interested me after I saw her appearance on the Today show. I downloaded the book right away to my Kindle app and have been slowly reading it.
For some reason, prison stories really interest and mesmerize me. I’m always fascinated by the odd feeling of ‘home’ that inmates admit to after awhile and how innovative they can be in their efforts to make daily life bearable. There was no shortage of such ingenuity in this book as Piper takes the reader through her journey as a drug smuggler, her return to a straight laced- life and then the day when the FBI showed up on her doorstep to arrest her for her part in a life she hadn’t lived in over ten years.
Piper is sent to Danbury Women’s prison, which seems like a hellhole but isn’t ‘really’ prison, according to the inmates. Navigating the experience with all of the knowledge of an infant child, Piper learns daily who to trust, who to make friends with, how to survive. By the book’s end, she had served 13 months- 345 days, approximately.
The book read more like a diary, which I enjoyed. No exposition or making up of things that weren’t happening from Piper’s point of view. Despite how long it took me to finish it, I did love the book.
On other fronts, I’m being taunted. Not really. But really.
Every month I get the Newsletter from Glimmer Train. And for a year I’ve been thinking I will write something to submit. And then I write something and think it’s stupid and I don’t submit it and it sits there. Or I dive back into my fanfiction and write so much of it that it’s hard to focus on regular fiction.
So I’ve decided. I’m going to take one of my recent stories, The Storm and try to get it critiqued by a few people to see if I can submit it before the end of the month for the Fiction Open. Stories just have to be 2,000 to 20,000 words long, be fiction, not be a novel excerpt and not be a children’s story. I think I can handle that. It’s the writing well enough to be recognized by a literary journal part that I don’t know about.
I’m not stopping there. I’ve had an idea for a nonfiction piece that’s been rolling around for a few weeks. I’d like to map it out some on paper to see how it flows. Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t. Won’t know until I try it.
I am determined to try.
Needs to be edited, finessed a bit, but I actually finished Same Time Next Week.
I’m in shock.
It’ll actually end up being 21 chapters on the archive because one chapter is over 10K words and the archive holds, at most, ~10K words at a time, so ch 19 will end up being split. I mean, I started this story Nov 1, 2009. It only took me almost a year to finish it. I hope it’s not lame and doesn’t seem like I just wanted to get it done… everything I wanted to accomplish with it, I did. Wrapped up my loose ends and made sure each character came full circle and solved all my conflicts and my ending is happy.
And I am happy.
Woo. I need a drank. Hopefully will be up later. I’m in a hurry to mark it complete but I at least want to read through them both to make sure I didn’t type poop instead of pool. (A real mistake I caught. Yowzers). I don’t want to correct too much because then I lose the passion. Just mechanics. That’s what I am telling myself, anyway!
YAY!
