nanowrimo

No Real Update Update

Posted on by kellyvincent

So I am in a major reading slump. It’s taking me forever to read anything. Thus there was no review last week, and none this week. Instead there’s a boring post about nothing. Despite all that, I did go to picture book school—my friend lent me her entire picture book collection in an attempt to get me to love them as much as she does. I’ve read about 20 of them so far. I enjoyed some of them, but I’m not in love yet.

I did submit all my final work for my MFA last week, so I am completely done with that with the exception of my final residency and my graduation reading, which is January 10th.

Other than that, I’ve been busy with NaNo and my art classes. I did finish NaNo—I got to over 50,000 words, although I’m still finishing up the draft. I finally figured out some of the things I was stuck on, so I need to go back and redraft, but I feel good about the story. For art school, I created the following drawing (it’s big—18” x 24”):

Drawing of my house

Also, for your amusement, I had an assignment where I was supposed to take some identical objects and modify each of them in three different ways. This was what I started with:

Bottles

I had trouble with the last one and eventually came up with this monstrosity:

Weird doll

(The bottle became a skirt, in case you were wondering.) Here they all are together:

Weird plastic bottle assignment

I’d Love a Review

Posted on by kellyvincent

As I’ve mentioned, I’m on a quest for reviews for Finding Frances. I want to run a promotion on Book Bub, and the rumor is you need at least twenty reviews to have a chance. This past Tuesday, I ran a promotion on the book that resulted in at least some sales, so that’s cool (my rating on Amazon went from 1,702,055 on November 4 to 27,553 on November 10). Obviously that’s nowhere near great success, but it’s nice to not be in the millions for a few days. Maybe someone who bought it will review it… I can hope. I’m also still in the middle of a review tour where I’m supposed to get eleven more reviews. I did get my first review that was lower than four stars, so that was interesting. I’m not upset—it still counts toward my total reviews and I still have a fairly good average rating.

I did decide to do NaNoWriMo for sure this year, and I’m barreling ahead with it, way ahead on word count because I’m working off an existing draft that has some usable parts (i.e., I’m cheating). I’m rewriting one of my romances.

At the end of October, I revised the first five chapters of Ugly and wrote a new chapter that comes between chapters one and two. I’m hoping these changes will be enough to make the editors and agents like it (though I have the rest of the chapters yet to do—that will happen after I finish my NaNo draft).

I also got my feedback back from Lou on the revised Sadie Speaks (the first 20 pages, anyway). He was mostly positive but had some tips I can use. I have just one more submission for him, and one for my research class, and I’m totally done with the MFA. My thesis was accepted by the library for binding earlier this week, so I’m officially done with that.

Style

Posted on by kellyvincent

Not a lot has changed in the past few weeks. I got my thesis back from the second reader, so now I’m ready to finalize it and send it in. I finished my class about narrative distance and got some feedback from the teacher, so now I feel ready to tackle fixing Ugly. I’m pretty sure I’m going to try to do NaNoWriMo this year, after waffling about it for a while. I may not succeed—may, in fact, give up part way—but I’m going to start it and see how it goes. I’m going to be busy because I’m also taking two art classes. Being me, I decided to go for it, and I enrolled in a BFA program in Illustration. Crazy, I know. But I'll learn stuff.

I’ve still been working through a pen and ink techniques book, copying from the artist’s drawings. I’m getting better and learning some techniques, and developing my own style (slowly). I’ve included a few pictures below.

Drawing of trees on a hill

Drawing of small sailboat

Drawing of castle stairs

Writing and Education

Posted on by kellyvincent

I recently joined Sisters in Crime, a mystery/suspense/etc. writers’ group, just in time to attend there SinC Into Great Writing: Creating Authentic Characters webinar. I was excited about it because Lou Berney, the author I’m working with this semester for my suspense class in my MFA, was featured. But K. Tempest Bradford was also presenting about writing the other. I’ve heard of her but never seen her teach, which is a shame because she’s a great presenter. If you’re a writer wanting to learning about diverse representation and writing characters different from you, I highly recommend looking for her workshops. She’s very organized, clear, and deeply knowledgeable. She’s also a funny (not excessively so, but she kept it light despite the serious nature of the topic). She also talked about sensitivity readers. Apparently the going minimum is about $250/300, which isn’t bad to me. The next part of the webinar was a conversation about character with Walter Mosley and Lou Berney, which was also interesting. It really was just a conversation for the most part, with the moderator asking a few questions to get things going.

In MFA news, I sent my thesis to the second reader, which means there are no more changes to make. I also turned in the synopsis of rewritten Sadie Speaks to Lou last week and I’m looking forward to getting his feedback on it. If he doesn’t have recommendations for major changes, I’ll be able to submit two samples from the beginning of the book, which I’m hoping is two chapters each. Otherwise, I’ll have to revise the synopsis for the first submission. I just have one more submission to make in my research elective (though I do have half a book to read for it). So I’m really close to being done here.

Outside of that, I just started an online class called How Stories Get Told: Voice and Narrative Distance which I’m hoping is going to help me fix the narrative distance problem Ugly has. Because I think that’s the problem. We’re so buried in her head we can’t see the rest of the world.

I’m still internally debating doing NaNoWriMo this year. This is the month I need to do the planning if I want to make it work. I would be rewriting a romance of mine. I’m also trying to figure out if I’m going to cheat if I do decide to go for it. I already have some of the novel written (actually the whole thing, but only some of that is usable), so I could count the parts I pull in toward my word count. Normally, I’m a purist about it—I only start brand new projects and would never cheat. But it is 2020. So.

One issue is that I want to work on Ugly, too, so it will be hard to do both, which means I may not get to Ugly until December, when I told the agents I could get it to them by the end of the year. I’m also still actively working on the Now Would Be Good stories. I’m running it through my book coach 2500 words a week, with many weeks to go. On top of that, I’m taking another writing class on short stories that starts on October 13, so I’ll be trying to produce work for that. On top of that, I’m studying calculus to prepare for starting the statistics master’s again next fall. So really, if I were sensible, I would not do NaNo. But this is me, so who knows what I’ll decide.

An update on the expensive cat problem: my MacBook Air display died again, and this time they replaced it and two internal cables. So there really was something wrong with it that wasn’t from Maddox biting it. But I still installed a Maddox bite deterrent system:

Maddox Bite Deterrent System - cardboard taped to the corners of the screen

So far it’s working reasonably well. I’ve caught him biting the cardboard several times, but he hasn’t gotten past it yet.

Expensive Cat

Posted on by kellyvincent

There's really not much going on in my writing world. Still working away on the Sarah stories (Now Would Be Good). I worked up a new synopsis of Sadie Speaks to send to my mentor in a few weeks. I'm also really frustrated—I applied to a postgraduate semester in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts—I was hoping to work with a well-known YA author on Ugly—but they're taking a long time to get back to me. I think it's a rejection, which means I should get started revising Ugly again, but since I don't know, I'm stuck waiting. I'm kind of disappointed, though. I felt pretty confident in my application. But whatever.

I'm also trying to decide if I'm going to do NaNoWriMo this year. If I do, I'll be working on my second romance. It isn't totally planned out yet, which means I'll need to spend some of October prepping it. I haven't done NaNo since 2017, when I wrote Ugly.

I'm going to be running a sale (99 cents) on my book for a week in November and featuring it on Bargain Booksy again, on November 10th. I'm hoping to get a few more sales than I did when it was still $4.99.

Now for a little rant. This guy:

Maddox biting computer
Maddox trying to bite my work computer

Is in big trouble. I have a Macbook Air that I bought in July of 2019, and about four weeks ago the screen died. I fortunately have Apple Care, because they counted the chipped glass from Maddox's bites as accidental damage, so it didn't qualify for repair under the warranty (even though the tech at the Genius Bar agreed with me that it was unlikely to have actually caused the damage). That was $100. Within 3 hours of getting the repaired computer back, this monster bit the corner again, chipping it. Then, last Wednesday, the screen abruptly died. So, either his biting really is causing the damage, or I'm just really unlucky (no, I'm definitely unlucky, either way). I have an appointment at the Genius Bar Thursday. I'm hoping Apple Care will apply again and it will only be $100 again.

Sigh.

Writing in 2018

Posted on by kellyvincent

2018 was a tough writing year in some ways, but also good. I had a bunch of rejections on Finding Frances, but I finally heard back from the editor I sent it to in September and she requested a full. This is the last shot for that book, but she sounded really interested in the sample she read, so I am hopeful. I should hear in the next few weeks. I’m sincerely hoping that even if it’s a no, she’ll give me some feedback on it. I’ll be setting it aside, but it would be good to have some pointers on what to try next, when I do decide to crack it open again.

I also spent a good portion of the year frantically working on Ugly, my 2017 NaNoWriMo book, trying to get it ready for the PNWA conference in September. I had several requests on it, which is pretty exciting since those were my first pitches on it (six pitches and six requests, including four fulls). The five I sent are all still out there (I skipped one of the agents because she doesn’t like something that appears in one of my other books, so she probably wouldn’t be a good fit for me). I didn’t send them until early November so I’m not expecting to hear anything for a bit. 

Also, of course, I spent half of the year on the MFA, which was great. I got two short stories done, both of which I’m happy with. One of them is going to be expanded a bit, but I like the short version and plan to enter it in some contests. I’m looking forward to the residency coming up and starting the next semester, especially the playwriting course (should be fun). I already made up my reading list and just need to get my faculty advisor to approve it or make her changes to it. This semester my mentor is Allison Amend. She’s written a few novels for adults. Still, I’m hoping to learn a lot from her, even if she isn’t focused on YA. 

I also judged for the mainstream category of the PNWA contest, which was a challenge and time-consuming, but also beneficial. It still took up most of May. I was bummed not to final in any of the categories I entered, but such is life. 

I was bummed not to do NaNoWriMo this year after a five-year successful run, but I had to prioritize the MFA. I may be able to do it 2019 because I won’t be doing the MFA that semester (I don’t have enough vacation so I have to wait until 2020 to start back).

Not directly writing-related but still significant to me, I also lost my favorite cat, Marvin, who would have been my muse if I’d had one. But I got a new little guy (Maddox) who’s actually a lot like Marvin. Not that he’s a replacement, but still. He’s affectionate but not overly so. 

Marvin made creepy by a Happy Light
My favorite picture of Marvin
Maddox posing for the camera by the window
The new guy, in a rare moment of calm

I suppose that’s it for 2018. I’m hoping 2019 has more actual good news in it than 2018 did, instead of just prospects. 

NaNo 2017 Update

Posted on by kellyvincent

NaNo is wrapping up and I’m pleased to say that I “won” Monday, though I technically hit the 50,000-word mark on Sunday the 19th. I’m not quite sure how I did it that fast, but I’m trying to finish the whole book by the end of the month. I’m projecting 80,000 words at this point. I think maybe the reason it went so fast is that it’s a semi-autobiographical story, so a lot of it was just telling what happened instead of having to figure out how things would go. Right now I’m in the middle of writing a visit to Glasgow, Scotland, which is really fun because I’m reliving the time I spent there (which was awesome).

Here’s my status as of this afternoon:

NaNo 2017 bar graph
NaNo progress

It’s really crazy. I should be at 43,333 by the end of today, but I’m currently at 70,855 and am not done for the day. 🙂

That’s all for now. I’m busy.

NaNoWriMo 2017

Posted on by kellyvincent

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an annual challenge where you attempt to write a whole “novel” in November. 50,000 words. That requires an average of 1667 (actually 1666.666…) words (5-6 pages) a day for 30 days. Then, at the end, you have a rough draft of a book.

Now, to be sure, that draft is pure rubbish. And probably too short, unless you’re writing middle grade. Even YA is usually 60,000+ words. So it has to be heavily revised and greatly expanded upon. But the main point is that you have something substantial to work on. It can be regarded as a very long synopsis with some actual scene writing. Most writers need that first draft to start the hard part of writing. Recognition of the value of that draft is clear in that it even has a nickname: “shitty first draft.”

Anyway, NaNo’s really hard. Each year tens of thousands sign up (in 2010 it topped 200,000 and last year there were 384,126 participants). And each year a small fraction of those people actually “win” (i.e. write at least 50,000 words). Last year it was less than 9%. The website allows you to track your word count and interact with other participants on forums. It even helps people coordinate to interact in real life (such as in “write-ins” where people get together to write).

But I’ve found NaNo both helpful and fun. I never participate on the forums, but it’s fun to watch my friends’ word counts go up. I’ve done it four years in row now (winning each time) and am about to start my fifth one. I used to have trouble getting myself to actually write. NaNo sort of trained me to write every day. Outside of November, I don’t write quite so much, but I do spend at least a couple hours doing writing-related work almost every day, with more on weekends. NaNo’s also good to break the habit most amateur writers have of constantly going back to the beginning to fix what they’ve realized needs to be changed—thus never making it past the first third of the book or so… You have to just forge ahead, no matter what you realize you’ll have to go back and change (after you get to the end of that first draft).

I’m scrambling to get ready, tweaking my 40-page synopsis (really, a scene-by-scene breakdown) after some feedback from my critique group. It’s going to be another YA novel, though I’m also trying to get a draft of a different novel ready for a beta reader since I won’t have time in November and she’s ready to read. And on top of that, I have two blogs that I post weekly to, so I’m trying to get some reviews ready for those (which means I’m trying to read a bunch, too). Just a few days left to get it all ready. I’m excited to start the new YA novel, which is going to be somewhat autobiographical, but also nervous because some of it’s going to be hard to write. However, people say writing about unpleasant memories can be therapeutic, so we’ll see.