Showing posts with label NaNoWriMo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NaNoWriMo. Show all posts

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Sea Change


Yes, I have some new decor thanks to the folks at Jelly Pages. Since the novel I'm working on is nautical by nature, I thought it was time for a seafaring makeover. This format helps me focus on the task at hand, and I hope it puts you, my readers, into a "rudder and tackle" frame of mind- minus the sea sickness of course.

The title of the novel is Good Hope. It chronicles the adventures of Randall Grayson, a modern, middle-aged business man who joins the effort to recreate a historic voyage to the tip of Africa aboard the Elissa, the official Tall Ship of Texas.

The story of Good Hope began as a National Novel Writing Month project back in December 2007. Now, three re-writes later, it is the subject of a Six Month novel writing project that the members of the Humble Fiction Cafe' have selected as our 2009 project. We have specific goals to reach each month, and the intent is to have a finished product available for review on July 4th of this year.

This will pose as a double adventure for me. Good Hope was my first completed novel, but revising it into a manuscript for publication will be a unique experience and no easy task. Secondly, much like my main character, I'm very likely in over my head, but as I persevere I will be able to keep you up to date on the tragedies and triumphs along the way.

It will be an interesting six months, so strap yourselves into your bunks, and get ready to take on water, because this is indeed an adventure of fictional proportions.

Friday, February 29, 2008

National Novel Editing Month!

Yes kids, it's that time again!

National Novel Writing month has long since passed us, and if you can remember way back to November 2007, you may even recall that you wrote a novel (or at least attempted one) in that cool, gray month! If so, then get it out, dust it off, and get your inner editor out of the trunk in the basement. It's time to turn loose that nitpicking, insufferable prat!

National Novel Editing Month (or NaNoEdMo for short) begins tomorrow, March 1st!

Much like the goal for novel writing, the goal of this exercise is to log at least 50 hours of editing during the month of March. I did it last year, and while it was the single hardest writing task I have ever undertaken, it produced enough of a coherent story from my 2006 NaNoWriMo novel to give it life here in 2008. I just entered it into the Fort Bend Writer's Guild Spring Novel contest!

My only fear is that they will love the first two chapters that I submitted...and ask for the rest.

The "rest" is not ready, so I am using "EdMo" to get it prepared, in the event that a fabulously wealthy, literary agent from Fort Bend county should show up on my doorstep and demand that I allow him to present my heartbreaking work of genius to Harper Collins.

Care to join me?

No, not in delusions- in editing.

Head over to http://www.nanoedmo.net/xoops2/ and sign up, or if you're just curious, check out the pages and see the bizarre cast of characters that shows up for this annual event of self-abuse and loathing.

Best regards for a safe and sane March! (isn't that the name of the mad hare in Alice in Wonderland?)

Gary