My vlog post for this week for Wo-Town Writers. And since I need to post more on here anyway, figured I’d share the love. Enjoy!

No…really. I think I missed it entirely.

This happens to me almost every month. Halfway through, everyone around me starts talking about how the month is flying by. I scoff. I claim the month is NOT flying by. And, yet, at some point I blink and we’re in a new month.

And then I realize, once again, my epic failure of posting here on a regular basis.

*sigh*

Truth is, my life has been eaten by revisions. I’m trying to revise two things at once. Sound crazy? Yeah, it kind of is. Especially since I’m also trying to write a first draft of something else. And I’m trying to do this collaborative project with one of my friends. And I’m trying not to jump off a bridge.

And, of course, on top of all this, my reading list has gotten ridiculous.

I’m not even going to try to list everything I’ve read over the past few weeks. The “reserve” button on my library’s website has been calling to me since mid-January and, of course, all of these books I put on reserve came in at the SAME TIME.

And as I’m reading those, I hear about other shiny books. It’s a never-ending cycle, my friends.

At the rate I’m going, I’m not going to need to hunt for reading material until NEXT January. Which is fine, except that in the summer I need to re-read the Harry Potter series (in preparation for the last hoorah of the last movie coming out) and then I need to re-read the first two books in the Prophecy of the Sisters trilogy (in preparation for the third book coming out) and then I need to re-read the first two books of The Hollow trilogy (also in preparation of the final installment being released).

Yes, so revisions and reading. That’s what I’ve been doing.

In the little free time I’ve given myself from all of that, I’ve also joined a local writing critique group. I’m really excited, because I missed having this kind of interaction with fellow writers. We have a blog. You can find it here.

I’ve also been Irish Dancing my little butt off. St. Patrick’s Day approaches, which means the performance season for us. Pretty much as soon as St. Patrick’s stuff is over, our teacher has us getting ready for the Dublin Irish Festival in August. Yes, we start preparing for that in April. No, that’s not actually all that early, especially when our teacher has been known to mention in at the very first class of the “school year” (which is always a month after DIF).

My other exciting thing is that I’ve joined the staff of the Harry Potter Alliance as part of their Web Team. I’m super psyched, and it’s doubly exciting because the week I joined we launched the next “Horcrux” in our Deathly Hallows Campaign.

Hopefully, all things are going well with all of you! One person commented on my last post with an “award” — which I hope to respond to next time, when I’m not so tired. I swear I didn’t forget! Remember those revisions? Yup. My soul has been nommed.

You know what I find fascinating?

A year ago (or so), I started quering Nor the Battle. So, it was only a little over a year ago that I finished revising it. I remember when I sent it out into the world, I felt so sure about how it read. I thought it was brilliant. I was confident (for the most part, post-midnight-panic attacks).

Today a funny thing happened.

For some reason, I went back and read the beginning of my manuscript for that. You know what I discovered?

It. Made. Me. Cringe.

What was I thinking, sending that rambly prologue into agents’ inboxes for the last YEAR?!

I think it’s amazing how my writing perspectives have changed in just a year. The opening felt so pedestrian to me all of a sudden. I didn’t know how I could have written that and thought it was such a good opening. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a rather long break from it. Maybe my writing style has changed in the last year and I didn’t even notice. Whatever the case, something needed to be done.

So what did I do?

Right then and there, I revised it. Cut out the prologue entirely and fit what had once been in five (or more) pages down to two. Made it so the story starts with Chapter One, with just a bit of explanation as to what’s going on in the alternate story (instead of the rambly prologue).

And then, feeling better about myself, I did something I wouldn’t have done a year ago.

Right then and there, I sent out two queries. No questions. To some extent, I’d fixed that problem. Now time to test it.

Maybe it didn’t make the most sense to send out two queries right away, but I’ve been digging at this manuscript for a year and a half now. I’ve revised it multiple times. The only thing I was ever truly if-y on was that prologue. And now that problem has been (I hope) solved.

So…in the last year…not only did my writing style apparently change, but I’ve also gotten more gutsy about sending out queries.

About time.

Welcome to 2011! I have to say, I’m having a terrible time getting used to writing/typing 2011. I’m also having a terrible time NOT typing 12 for the month. Which is something of an issue, because I deal with dates nearly every second at my day job, so these last few days have been kind of tiring.

First of all, if you follow the Wo-Town Writers vlog, I said this week that if I feel like sharing what I am/was reading, then I would do that on here instead of in my videos. It was making them far too long and was starting to feel silly. So that’s what I’m going to do here. Right now.

The book I’m reading currently is The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove by Christopher Moore. This is actually only the second book of his that I’ve read, the first being Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (so funny). I love how ridiculous Moore’s stories are and this one is no exception. I’m only about a third of the way into it right now, though. The strange thing for me about reading Moore’s novels is that it does take me a while. While I enjoy them thoroughly, they’re not quite as enthralling to me as other things, so I tend to get distracted. They’re funny stories, comedies, and the novels I can’t put down are usually more along a serious line. Still great, though! I bought my copy of Lust Lizard on a whim at Half-Price Books, so the nice thing is I don’t have to worry about returning it to the library in time.

Come to think of it, I bought my copy of Lamb at HPB too. Funny how those things work out.

The novel I just finished reading, however, is Just Listen by Sarah Dessen (bought, again, on a whim at HPB…what is it with me and HPB?!). Thank god this past weekend was a long one for me, otherwise I would have been even more tired than I already was over the last couple of days. There was something about this story that sucked me in and I just couldn’t put this novel down. I don’t know if I could put my finger on what it was. I just know I literally finished this book in one weekend…which is kind of a big deal for me anymore. While I spent the entire novel having a pretty good prediction as to what ordeal main character Annabel had suffered (and was, for the most part, correct), I was still riveted by her story. I loved the underlying plots regarding her and her sisters’ relationships with each other, and of course her relationship with Owen. If you haven’t read this book…highly recommend.

On a completely un-reading-related note, I’m slowly chipping away at my various projects. Call to Action is very slowly being revised. Its sequel is very slowly taking shape. I’m very slowly losing my mind. You know, the basics. I’m having a slightly more difficult time getting into Care’s head for the sequel. Upon reflection, I think this might have to do with how upset she is at this particular moment–it’s a certain level of upset that I’ve never really experienced personally. And her current situation is giving me a headache. New rules in the sequel, new culture of sorts. I’m having to figure out what has become her new every-day, which is exhausting. I might have to resort to index cards to plot this one out…and that’s serious, because I don’t outline usually.

In the meantime, my procrastination skills have gotten AMAZING.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season…or is having a wonderful season. Whichever way you want to spin it. My holiday season is hardly over. Sure, Christmas has come and gone. But that was only Christmas #1 for me. Christmas #2 falls on New Year’s Eve this year. Christmas #2 is when my mom’s side of the family gets together for their holiday celebrations. We exchange gifts. We eat rich food. It’s all very fancy (sometimes, when EVERYONE is present for the Dudley Family Christmas Party, we’ll take a large family picture. The last one was taken two years ago, because that was the last time my cousins were able to make it from Chicago).

And then I have Christmas #3. Sort of. That’s also on New Year’s Eve, but that one is ALWAYS on New Year’s Eve. That’s my Christmas party with my friends. Sort of. Because we also combine it with New Year’s Eve stuff, it’s only Christmas-related for all of an hour (which is when we get bored with unwrapping shiny things and return to our on-going game of Apples to Apples). That party is a Secret Santa one. I bought my person’s gift several weeks ago. Since then it’s pretty much been gathering dust in my room. Eventually I’ll wrap it.

I’ll let you know for sure, once all the gift-giving stuff is over, but this year is turning into something of a re-creation of a Christmas I had about ten years ago. That was when I had just fallen in love with Harry Potter. I have a picture from that Christmas…me with all my Harry Potter stuff. A t-shirt, a magnet, a trivia game…some other things too that I can’t currently remember. I need to find that picture again, because I might need to re-create it. So far I’ve gotten the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, ultimate edition DVD of Sorcerer’s Stone, and a Deathly Hallows wall calendar. My nerdliness makes me very happy.

It’s also a Christmas of YA novels. So far I’ve gotten The Hollow and The Haunted by Jessica Verday, as well as Looking for Alaska by John Green. I’m stocking up on some favorite books, essentially, because when I finally move out I want to have my own little library in my room. I don’t have room for it now, because I refuse to buy another huge bookcase until I know what kind of living situation I’ll be going to.

I hope you all have had a wonderful holiday season. Have a safe and happy New Year, in case I don’t post again before that!

Apparently, my mind needed a bit of a writing vacation. I think that’s why I’ve been in a slump for the weeks since NaNo ended.

I mean, it’s kind of understandable.

In October, I was desperately trying to finish Call to Action before NaNo began. I succeeded. I finished the first draft mere hours before ringing in November. I celebrated by getting some Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt. And then I returned home to count down to midnight.

Midnight hit. I started writing again. Frantically. I was desperate to win NaNo a second year in a row. I succeeded.

And then I started editing Call to Action.

Frankly, I think my brain was screaming at me to JUST STOP IT, ALREADY!

This past week, I was a little concerned as to why I haven’t been able to sit down and start working on Book 2 of Care’s saga. The sequel to Call to Action. My first attempt at what might possibly be a trilogy. I was worried that I’d burned myself out. I was worried that I was too scared. I was worried that I would forget something significant that happened at the end of Call to Action, since I’m still trying to read through that mess.

In truth, I’m realizing now that I think I just needed a break. I needed a couple weeks of NOT writing in order to get writing again. I needed a short time to just focus on making Call to Action less of a disaster. I needed to get some pleasure reading done and step away from the writing marathon that my life has been over the last two months. I think the break worked. Over the last couple days, I’ve felt excited about starting a new story. I’ve felt ready to begin work on the continuation of Care’s story.

At work for the last few days, I’ve been listening to my Book 2 playlist on shuffle on my iPod. One song in particular has been inspirational for me to get in the right mindset. It’s a song that I didn’t have when I was working on Call to Action, but I wish I had. It’s from Scott Alan’s newest CD (it’s the hidden track), which wasn’t released until I was already done writing that first draft.

I wanted to share it with you, since it’s been on my mind. Hopefully, this inspiration will stick around for a while longer and I’ll actually get down to writing within the next couple days.

Enjoy!

Ever heard of the musical [title of show]? If not…shame on you. It’s wonderful. You need to get on that. If you’re a creative person at all, you would probably love it. It’s all about the creative process and the problems that come with it.

So for this week’s Wo-Town Writers vlog post…since it’s free week and we’re getting to do whatever we want…I decided to talk about how I relate to the [title of show] song “Die Vampire, Die.” It’s kind of my theme song, especially when I’m starting new projects or editing finished ones. Thus…now.

Here we are. November is over. Another National Novel Writing Month has come and gone. Somehow, I survived. Even more than that–I won for my second year in a row!

It feels good. It feels incredibly surprising as well. If I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to pull off 50k in 30 days this year. Sure, I was psyched. And of course I was going to try. But…the thing is…this is the first year I’ve held a full-time job at the same time as attempting NaNoWriMo. The five years I participated while being a full-time student, I managed to fail every year. NaNo 2009 was something of a luxury in my eyes–while it sucked that I didn’t have a job, I could focus all my energy on that 50k finish line. My confidence was a little down at the beginning of November this year, because I could only think about those five years when I was a full-time student and failed miserably because I didn’t have the time and the energy to put into such intense writing.

Color me surprised when it turned out to be a little easier than I originally thought it would.

The first important thing I learned–just focus on that 1667 words per day quota. Yeah, I knew this from other years. It’s preached around every corner in the weeks leading up to NaNo and throughout the month as well. Anyone who’s participated can rattle of that you just need 1667 words a day in order to reach the 50k at the end of thirty days. Hell, even I’ve rattled off that information. I had three mentees this year and I told them this about a thousand times before November started. Still, it was something I needed to remind myself several times. If I could just get those 1667 words a day, then I was fine. If I happened to get more than that, then I was golden.

The second important thing–it’s okay to fail. I’m not even talking about the general sucktitude of the story itself (and my novel from this November has a pretty grand level of suck). I even embrace the sucktitude of the NaNo novel first draft. It’s part of the fun…just shutting up that stupid inner editor that is perpetually running its mouth in my head and writing whatever happens to come to mind. No, I’m talking about the failers of the actually daily word counts. The fancy stats page on each user’s profile on the NaNo site this year showed more info than usual. At the beginning of the month, I somehow managed to convince myself that I would have the perfect November, where I would be at least on quota every day. I never wanted to see those stats fall below the set goals on my page.

This, my friends, was just stupid.

It’s okay to fail. I realized this by about week 2, when the struggles started. When the Harry Potter movie came out and one of my best friends from college came into town for the midnight release and I didn’t get any writing done for three days, that’s when it really mattered. It was okay that I didn’t have the “perfect” November stats-wise. The end goal was the important thing, and I accomplished that two days ahead of schedule.

The third important thing–family drama is a great time to write. A story: I went to Hamburg, NY for Thanksgiving. Stayed with the grandparents. Ate at the aunt and uncle’s. Spent six hours both ways in the car with my parents and sister. I love my family. I do. But we’re really good at the drama. With the exception of my step-grandmother, I’m the only liberal democrat in the entire family. My step-grandmother is far more left-wing and vocal than I am (which might seem impossible, but it’s true). Some of my other relations are incredibly far right-wing. When the drama started or the politics were brought up, that in particular was when I opened my laptop. Ignored my family. As soon as all that started, it was time to write.

I got a lot written over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Now it’s back to the real world. I have a first draft of a project I finished in October (but started writing mid-summer) that I’m about to do my first round of edits and revisions on before begging friends to read through it too. I have another novel to start–the sequel to the one I’m about to start editing, actually. I’m getting back on the agent query train for the one I started sending out earlier this year. The novel I wrote this November is going to be put in its little drawer, along with all my other NaNo novels, both completed and otherwise. Maybe someday I’ll take it back out to make it look less pitiful, but for now we need some distance from each other. It was fun, but now my energy needs to go elsewhere.

Farewell, NaNoWriMo. I’ll see you next year.

Well, folks. Here we are. The end of the first week of National Novel Writing Month 2010. So far, I’ve managed to keep on track. I’ve gotten into the habit of not allowing myself to go to bed until I have my daily quota–which has, unfortunately, resulted in some sleep deprivation throughout the week days. Ah, well…that is NaNo.

At this point in the month, I’m at the confusing love-hate, don’t-really-know-where-this-is-going, I-feel-rambly juncture in my novel. I’ve discovered my main character thinks more than she talks, which is an interesting new challenge, because normally I feel like I’m heavy on the dialogue. I’m not at all surprised that one of my MC’s siblings came out as the uncensored, mouthy personality within the first three sentences–it seems like all my MCs in all my various novels have at least one sibling with this type of personality.

My current challenge, story-wise, is that I’ve never written a novel that’s split into different parts. I don’t know how long I want each part to be. I feel like the first part is going to be too short, but at the same time, I’m worried the first part will be too rambly.

This afternoon, I plan to get ahead on my word count, so I don’t have to stress about it so much in Week 2, which is a notoriously painful week for NaNo participants. I’m going to the Columbus region write-in at Panera today. A good three or four hours of focus will help me a lot.

So…as usual…I have failed on an epic scale with posting my thoughts this October. I fully intended to. I wanted to show, step-by-step, my pre-NaNo planning. I wanted to ramble about how the finishing-the-first-draft-of-the-current-project was going. I wanted to do all of this.

Ah, well. The best laid plans and all that.

We are now under a week until November 1 and the start of National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo never ceases to bring me great excitement. This will be my seventh year, and I’m just as excited about doing it as I’ve been in previous years. One of my friends from dance class pointed out last night that I write a novel every month, so what’s the deal?

Now, granted, she said this in jest. But it got me thinking.

First of all…I don’t write a novel every month. I write every month, yes. I’m working on novels in an almost perpetual way. But I do not normally write one novel in one month. Typically, one first draft will take me a couple months (sometimes more, depending on life). So there’s something exciting about challenging myself even further to sit my butt down in the chair and get that 1667-word quota for every day. There’s something exciting about making the internal editor shut up for once and just write (my internal editor is a real pain most of the time).

But here’s the other reason why NaNo still brings me great excitement: the community. Half of the fun is the community of Wrimos (the term for NaNo participants) from around the world. The NaNo message boards remain the one place on the internet where people post in complete, grammatically correct sentences. This community thrives off of jokes that make the rest of the world raise their eyebrows–plot bunnies, Traveling Shovel of Death, writing dares, and everything in between. As soon as October starts, this community jumps into action with amazing energy. Once November hits, this community becomes a place of comfort and procrastination and cheerleaders.

This is a community that encourages NaNo veterans to mentor Newbies. I have three Newbies this year who adopted me as their mentor. I am honored by this. I’m honored that these three Newbies chose me to help them through their first National Novel Writing Month.

This is a community that, when people meet in the real world, it’s like we’ve known each other forever. I went to the Columbus Region’s kick-off party last weekend. We all started throwing around inside jokes almost immediately. Everyone was welcoming. The energy was contagious.

This is what NaNoWriMo is to me. It’s mostly about the writing, but that’s not everything. I could do the 50k-in-30-days thing any time I want, but I choose to do it with the community. The writing is what makes the event, but the community is what makes it special.