Advice from the monastic cell

And people think being a medievalist can’t help you on the modem world!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/books/review/their-noonday-demons-and-ours.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb2

Still want to learn how to be a stylite though.

That was way too easy to accidentally unpublish. Republishing!

Editing update

So I am now working on Chapter 5 of editing for the NaNoWriMo 2010 novel, which has the horrific working title of “1950”.

I’ve organized all the scenes through chapter 9.

I’m not quite sure if I have a good sense of what I am doing in this draft yet. It seems very trial and error in a lot of ways. I’d like to be more aware of what I’m doing so, you know, I can do it again. For the other two drafts.

Day 29, 48000 words

Pretty much finished story however. Trying to backfill a few scenes that became necessary due to later changes in the story. Still, word count is kinda neat. I think it’s the first time I ever hit a triple zero count.

day 27, session 1 40932

Over the 40k mark. 3 days left after today–although I admit i am hoping to hit around 3-4k words for the day.About to leave Istanbul. This is extending a bit more than i thought it would, Which is good–as it also adds a bunch of scenes that were needed previously, fills in some gaps and shortens the scenes that were so hard to write earlier. Apparently, it’s hard to keep writing when you have nothing to say. Who knew?Music for next story: Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Yes, I’ve already decided.

day 26, session 1, 39455

So here’s the first set for the day. Now I’m off to run again, which I’m not looking forward to [whenever am I however?]
I really hate running. But it works. Also I want to do it while the weather is nice.
Also, I need to figure out what is going to happen to make Del panicked about Julie which will drive the last quarter of the novel. Right now we’re having lots of fun in Istanbul, but it’s not going to last forever. He has to get back to France somehow.

Next year

So last night I thought about what I want to do next year (novella series) what genre I’d like to play with next (fantasy) and started brainstorming ideas for it.

I had stayed away from fantasy due to the amount of world-building I thought would be involved, but decided to work on something more character based and fill in the details later [a bit like how I am handling the historic elements in my current book].

Still, as I would not be writing this for another 8 months, that will give me lots of time to brainstorm and create a skeleton.