What I'm Listening To: The Green Mile
What I'm Doing: Brainstorming my novels.
First of all, we can see how well I do when I give myself something to do every day. I'm going to try to keep up with the shorts, but I've been doing more thinking and reading than writing lately. A horrible thing for an author in progress to admit, I know, but I can almost taste publication. I don't know if this has to do with the fact that I submitted a short story to the
On the Premises contest - I'll find out whether or not anything comes of it by mid-October - or my currently-in-editing
Eversong WIP, but it's almost tangible.
I'm watching The Green Mile, the movie based off the book by Stephen King. The book always - always - makes me cry. I've read it dozens of times - I know how it ends. But every single time, I cry. And the movie's no different.
Well, I started this post to talk about why I slacked off on the daily shorts, and to announce the beginning of a new WIP, as well as some news about Nano.
I'm sure everyone knows about it, but if there's anyone who doesn't, it's short for NaNoWriMo, which is further short for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is starting from November 1st, you have thirty days - until November 3oth - to write at least 50k words. A novel in a month. All the fun stuff - editing and revisions, turning that awful piece of work that you slaved over for thirty days into something readable - comes later. I've read horror stories from agents who received MSS with
exactly fifty thousand words - stopping in the middle of a sentence, even - and another MS that had a little note reading 'Done for the day' after every 1700 words or so.
Those stories make me cry. The very idea of sending an unedited MS to someone - especially after something as hectic as Nano - is abhorrent. I believe I've said something to this effect before. The least they could have done was finished the sentence or skimmed through to remove the extras.
Anyway, a friend of mine over on the Quill and Ink sent me the first chapter of her novel, and she'd done something pretty neat in front of it, creating a publishers page and a title page and whatnot. I happened to be reading
Sunshine by Robin McKinley when the new idea struck (like lightning) so I used her novel as the basis for my own 'publishers' and title pages, and in
Sunshine, is also a list of her other novels, so I added my own.
All of mine aren't written yet, of course. But here's the list of books I want to write:
Moonlight
Eversong
Return to Eversong
Eversong: Dark Star Rising
Tales of Eversong
Eden’s Gate
Perfect
Mischief and Murder
Prelude to Dawn
Twilight Serenade
WishMaker
Heaven’s HalfwayTales of Eversong is the collection of short stories revolving around the
Eversong universe, which will be up on my website for free if I don't get them published. When I get a website.
Anyway, although
Moonlight is the newest one - it's in the planning stages right now - for Nano, I'll be working on book two of the Eversong Chronicles (formerly Legends of Eversong; I haven't decided which to go with yet)
Return to Eversong. That'll make at least three novels written in a single year, because I'm resolved to complete
Eden's Gate (at least to the first draft) before the year is out.
But it was that list in the beginning of
Moonlight that made me really stop, take a step back, and take a good hard look at what I'm doing. If I one day manage to complete
all of these - which I fully intend to, within the next few years - I'll make myself into one of those writers who pumps out novels like a machine.
