Currently viewing the tag: "excerpt"
Despite my wall last week and my rantings last Saturday, I managed to hit 50k last night before I slept. :) I decided to start skipping scenes already because the first date scene I wrote may be cute, but it’s getting really hard to write, and everyone’s just talking all over the place. Haha. And speaking of things going all over the place, my story is there too, and I haven’t touched a lot on the subplot (do chick lit books have subplots?), and I still don’t know what my ending would be. I think my two protagonists really have this thing for each other, but I have never written anything where the two people would get together in the end, so it’s kind of foreign territory for me. I want to leave things hanging, open to interpretation and all that.
Oh and I realized that Ruth’s dates are always on dinner times, so I’m guessing she will go fat at the end of the novel, unless I make her metabolism go fast (haha), or get her some best diet pills. Or, I better just define the other things she does so there’s more variety when she goes out. :D
This is my fourth year of hitting 50k, but I don’t want to stop here. I actually want to finish this novel, so I will be continuing to write even if I’ve reached the prescribed word count goal. My personal goal is 60k, so I’m still 9500 words away. Eeep!
Anyway, I better get ready for work. :) Here’s the fourth excerpt for this week. This is an exaggerated case of a jealous ex. :D I have a feeling I did not really convey Ruth’s fear but what the heck. I’ll do edits next time.
After flying high the first two weekends of November in my novel…I hit the wall.
Roland/xrecent said it well from yesterday’s write-in said it well: the wall is big and scary because you don’t know what is happening at the other side. In Chris Baty’s words last 2004:
You’ll know you’ve hit the Wall when you start thinking that the whole endeavor is futile. When you start worrying that you don’t have the time or imagination to pull it off, and you come to see your story as an unmitigated disaster that should be put out of its misery before the thing gets old enough to remember where you live.
And I’ve been hitting it a lot the past week — talk about being caught in a total Week 2 slump.
It started with my MC’s crying mode last week. I managed to write a better chapter but it was still terribly boring, and hard to write. I thought that would be okay, but then when I started on the next chapter, I was stumped. What happens now?
It was annoying. And then my internal editor decided to show up, and it keeps on telling me how flat my writing is and how emo everyone has become and how I approached it wrongly and how I should just start from the very first part and write again and not think of finishing the entire story this month. I tried to look for some dares and prompts (like including Plum trees in the novel even if there are no plum trees there) but none worked. Yesterday it told me my build up was too slow, and I should have just plunged in and that I really did not know my characters at all…and it really drove me crazy. I wondered if the story was even worth telling at all.
So last night, after being so frustrated with what I’ve been doing, I took another break. I took a shower and thought of how to approach things in the story. I always get my best ideas in the shower and I really hoped to get it then. Slowly, as I rinsed off the shampoo, I found some glimmer of new ideas inside my head, another way to approach the story.
And today I wrote.
I’ve managed to hit 38k already, and I’m still writing along steadily. I do hope I can get through this particular rough patch, and get to the exciting parts (which I honestly still have no idea how to write). I think I’ll be doing some outlining in my spare time soon.
Anyway, before I go to bed today so I can start early tomorrow for some early morning writing, here’s one of the versions of Chapter 7, which I don’t know if I will be able to include at all. It was slightly fun to write though, even if I think it absolutely sucks. :P
So here’s the second weekend and I finally broke into 20,000 words. I want to reach 25k before I sleep tonight, but as luck would have it, I have some other writing assignments that I need to finish. I have 12 reflections due for Didache 2010 next week, and to be honest, I wanted to write them all this weekend but it was impossible. I was too distracted. :( I’d rather write my novel, you know? But I must finish this.
So now I’m alternating between writing those reflections and my novel. You know when both is equally important?
I think it might be my last year for Didache. I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it. Or prayed about it. >_>
Anyway, writing the novel has been really fun. Week 2′s coming, but it’s supposed to be the hard week, but so far I’m not seeing any hard writing days yet. I want to start fleshing out the subplot with Ruth’s sister, but it’s not rearing its head, so I will go continue where my characters want me to go. Ruth’s gone speed dating and met Matt, reconnected with Ian and now she’s about to find out something about Glenn. And finally, Ruth is going on dates! I will finally make her go on a date with the guy who will ask her to buy term life insurance! I feel like I rambled for the first six chapters, but it feels just right to build up to her forced dating spree. Whee. This is the fastest progress I’ve had so far. :D I might just reach 60k. :D
I better get back to writing my reflections. :D And before I go, here’s an excerpt from Chapter 5:
So it’s finally November, and weirdly enough, when 12 midnight rolls in, I did not feel like writing at all. Is it over-excitement? Or am I just stressed over supervising the first ever PinoyWrimo Word War?
Probably the latter. The PinoyWrimos had their kick-off chat starting 10:30 PM on October 31, and it was a crazy conference. Last year we have about 15 in the chatroom. This year we got 29 inside. Whoa. What a wacky, wacky group, this is. Quotable quote of the weekend: TONIGHT WE WRITE! IN CBTL! OMG, that cracked me up.
Anyway, I decided to join some word wars myself, from yesterday’s unofficial one to today’s official one and I realized that I can actually crank out about 1000+ words in an hour — and I am even distracted at that time, checking the chat every now and even worrying how to get back inside the chatroom after Yahoo! kicked me out. All in an ML’s day’s work. :)
It’s been great so far. The people are wacky and amazing, and it’s so nice seeing everyone’s word counts spike up on this first weekend of November. It’s going to be a great month, I can feel it. :)
As for my novel…I think I wrote the longest first chapter ever. My first chapter was around 6000 words! Scrivener is lovely to use, and it’s gotten me really organized and motivated to write even more. My current word count is 6,913 and I’m planning to break into 7k tonight before I go to bed. I like my story this year than last year’s and I really hope I won’t lose steam and I’d get enough motivation to finish the novel within the month. :)
And because everyone’s waiting for this…here’s the first excerpt of I Am Single (And Everybody Knows). This is a part of chapter 1. :D
Please note that this is unedited stuff, so expect mistakes! :D
And here we go again! :) Current wordcount: 40,025 out of 50,000 words. Yeah! 10k words to go! I’m dreaming of finishing it by tomorrow, but let’s see. :)
So here we go, a fourth excerpt. No editing whatsoever done, so there’s still a lot of tweaking to be done. Here we go, click on the link below. :)
Because I felt like posting another one. :)
WORDCOUNT UPDATE: 31,917 out of 50,000 words. :) I’ll finish to 32,000+ by tonight before I sleep. Hopefully by this week I’ll get to 40,000 to 45,000. :) I can do this!
Work again tomorrow. I bet it’s going to be busy this week, so I better put in at least an hour of writing every night to be in the same pace.
Once again: this has gone through minimal editing, so don’t expect anything that stellar. This particular excerpt is taken from Chapter 7, as Rain was welcoming people into the reception of her brother’s wedding. Some revelations start here. :) Click on the Read the rest of the entry link. :)
Let me just say: I’M HALFWAY THROUGH 50,000 WORDS! Praise God! The next 25,000 words won’t be easy, but I can do this! :)
Okay, excerpt time again! :) This particular excerpt is from Chapter 5. :) Click the “Read the rest of the entry” link. Comments are open, but please bear in mind that most of the words here are due to the pressure of having a 50k word count by the end of the month. So forgive any run on sentences or whatever grammatical error there may be; I’ll deal with those after I’m done. And be gentle on the comments. :D
Well. I’m doing much better than the last time. :) I’ve got a lot of sporks, woobies, hugs and chocolates from these people, a lot more ideas and my inner editor has been buried deep in the abyss. :P
Aaaand, here’s a first taste of my NaNo 2006 Novel, Fall Like Rain. :P This is taken from the third chapter. Click the “Read the rest of the entry” link. Comments are open, but please bear in mind that most of the words here are due to the pressure of having a 50k word count by the end of the month. So forgive any run on sentences or whatever grammatical error there may be; I’ll deal with those after I’m done. And be gentle on the comments. :D
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