Monday, August 29, 2011

Progress!

I am quite happy to announce that I wrote today! A lot. Well, not a lot a lot. Relatively a lot. Some authors can crank out 3000+ words a day (although they may also be full time authors instead of full time students who are writing for fun, but whatever). I wrote two hundred something words today! Hooray! It doesn't seem like much now, but if I could do this every day, I'd be finished in like, nine or ten months.

The problem at the moment...well, there are actually two. The problems at the moment are that 1) I have no idea where this story is going and I'm only at the prologue and 2) the names are still eluding me.

I sat at my kitchen table this morning going through list after list, finding tons of names that I liked, but I'm still struggling with my main character (who will often be referred to as MC - I read too many author's blogs to not pick up all these handy abbreviations) and her mother. I have names that I really like for them separately, but they are almost identical.

And I just remembered another problem. Or maybe sub-problem. Cause of the problem? Anyway, whenever I try to brainstorm, thereby solving problem number one, I start thinking about my first MC, Kea (see, I said I would be using that!). She's so sneaky, trying to get me to write about her when I'm worried this story. I wonder what kind of stuff More Blessed MC (Delaney...or Dalanna...gah) will be going through and then I think of something to add to Kea's book. It's driving me crazy!

Still, I can post this for the first time! Official More Blessed Word Count: 262

Saturday, August 27, 2011

My Favorite Part

So I said I was going to hold myself accountable and post updates and word counts about the book I finally started writing.

Hrmm...well, in the past week, I have started a Word document and it has 454 words. 36 of them are actual story. I have all sorts of excuses for this - hours of driving, moving in, going to school, being lazy - but the biggest of them? Names.

That's right. 62 of my words have to do with names that I looked up this afternoon until I made myself stop. In honor of those, I though I would ramble about why I love names so much (AKA why my children will thank me for giving my characters names that I otherwise would have cursed them with).

Despite how many characters I've named and how long a list of names I have saved, I don't have any set way of picking them. Sometimes a name sparks the idea for the story, sometimes I just happen to see or think of one that works.

Sometimes I know what letter I want to use for the name and dig around until I find a perfect match. For this, I am obsessed with the Baby Name Voyager.

Sometimes I'm looking more for a meaning. Those are usually a lot easier to find.

I always like finding names with a meaning but that no one uses anymore. When I found this lovely site, I was thrilled. Name webs - oh my goodness beautiful!

A lot of times I end up with a theme for groups of characters. For this book, I've ended up with a mix of Armenian and Aztec/Mayan names. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, but I like how it turned out - the uniqueness of Armenian names (for Americans, at least) and the wealth of mythological names from the Aztec and Mayan cultures. I do a little cutting, nicknaming and letter rearranging to make my names fit together without being too bizarre.

Well, they're still bizarre, but I can't stand having boring names for my amazing characters. Picking the name helps me figure out the character's personality, which is why I was doing that before starting to write. Mother and Baby don't have the same...zest as Arawa or Emere. Although I may have gone a little too crazy with the names this time, which just lets me spend more time fiddling with them!

And yes, I am aware that I am very strangely in love with names.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Let's Get Down to Business

Despite an underwhelming response to my plea for everyone else to make my decisions, I'm going to start working on More Blessed. As of today, it has its own word document with my original notes and the summary I posted last time. Progress! Next up is an outline, since I have no idea where this story is headed. Then I'll start writing some actual paragraphs. Hopefully, within a few months (or years) I'll have a complete novel!

My sister and I have a habit of singing songs to each other all the time when I'm home, and so naturally this one popped into my head when I realized I have to remember to work on this thing. I guess I only have myself (and my crazy think-up-new-stories-all-the-time brain) to blame for that.

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Be My Motivation!

So I've been working on this post for a while now, after reading a couple months worth of a soon-to-be-published author’s blog. I started feeling really lame and a little guilty, because I have this idea in my mind about being a fabulous writer with five million published books and giving interviews on morning talk shows. But I haven’t actually written much of anything. A prologue, some outlines, and hundreds of summaries of my ideas. I promise you, I’m not even exaggerating about the hundreds.

Pretty picture! Did you know you can put a picture in the Google image search box?
What I have, or at least, what I’ve self-diagnosed myself with, is fear of commitment with a dash of indecisiveness. I’ve been focusing on one set of books, but they’re for my favorite character so I don’t want to ruin them by writing them first. I need a throw away, a book I like but don’t particularly care about making publishable. Since I’m indecisive and afraid of commitment, I’m going to let blog-land decide for me :)

Here are the working titles and short summaries for some of my okay ideas. I want y’all to leave comments telling me which one you like best. Whichever one gets the most comments will be the one I start seriously working on. To keep myself accountable, I’ll post word counts, something like every week, and maybe even snippets if it turns out good enough.

“12”
There is a circle of 12 huts with one in the middle. There are 12 people in each hut, and he is number 5. His life is simple – a few hours enjoying the sunshine when his group gets to go to the fields, a lot more crowded in the darkness of the hut, one of a circle of twelve identical huts. Then, his closest group member, 6, is replaced overnight. Although he has noticed replacings before, this time 5 has lost a friend – and he’s concerned that the new number 12 knows more about the center hut, number 13, than he should.

“Esmi”
Esmi is part of a traveling carnival, putting her fortunetelling skills to use after her grandfather’s death leaves her homeless. Unlike the rest of the gypsies, however, her fortunetelling is real. When Esmi’s magic attracts the attention of both the otherworld and a wizard, resulting in the destruction of the carnival, she must leave her simple life behind. Chased by demonic creatures and haunted by nightmares of the future, Esmi must trust that her wizard companion knows how to get rid of the curse she seems to have brought on herself.

“Ithica”
Ballerina turned revolutionary Anna returns to the capital after 5 years in a prison camp hoping for revenge on the oppressive government and her former partner, Mikhail, whom she holds responsible for her arrest. Once there, she struggles to bond with the son she hid in an orphanage before her imprisonment. However, she must reexamine her priorities when the government continues to intrude and she makes contact with other former revolutionaries.

 “More Blessed”
A single mother brings her 6 month old baby to the Registration Center, praying that she won’t be taken away – that she won’t be supernatural. When the infant doesn’t test positive, Mother is relieved. But that night, Mother is awoken by a loud growl. Thinking a wolf has crept into their cottage, she runs to the baby’s crib, only to find the infant awake, covered in hairs, and howling at the moon. The girl grows up hiding her shapeshifting abilities, until she meets a fellow supernatural – a recent graduate of the special institution that raises the children taken from their parents – and begins to question her mother’s decision to hide her powers.

P.S. If you ever have trouble reading anything on the posts, please tell me so I can fix it. I'm hoping this one isn't too wordy, I didn't realize how long these summaries had gotten :)