End of the year

... And a crazy year it has been! (when is it ever not?)

So, long time since the last update. Been busy getting sick, finishing up finals, and then being lazy for the last week with catching up on the happy things in life, such as finally restarting work on Resonance and doing some art. Hopefully I'll have a nice little digital painting done sometime by the end of the week, its of one of the characters in Resonance that you don't get to meet until the last half of the book. He's one of my favorite character designs, and I'm trying to do his character justice in the art. You'll understand when you see him.

So, with the end of the year coming up, I've also been working on a New Year's Resolution. I don't think I've ever really made a resolution and followed through with it, but this time around, I'm going to need to do this one.

The resolution is two-fold. First, I need to get Resonance done. It is now coming along quite nicely, NaNo made me into quite the rough draft writer (so many things that I need to fix already!) Second, I'm doing a drawing a week. Together, that should take up most of my free time, yay!

Well, Happy Holidays to everyone who reads this, and see you all next year! 

Recipe for a successful NaNoWriMo

What do you need to be successful in your NaNoWriMoing? Here's a small, printable card of what you need for a successful NaNo.

30 days
3 two liters of Dr. Pepper
Countless tea bags
A couple of nights with little to no sleep
12 cans of Monster Java
A couple cups of coffee
1 party size bag of Peanut Butter M&Ms
Very understanding friends and roommates
A good panic button that turns on when you realize that you have missed 10 days of writing, but still managed to hit the goal
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn as the initiative for a successful completion of NaNo.

On November 29th, 2010, at 50,001 words, I have successfully completed my first National Novel Writing Month.
Now to play catch up with all the homework that's due this week!

Debating

Well, as you know, November is coming to a close. Our snow melted off today (yay!), Golden Sun Dark Dawn comes out in 3 days, and NaNoWriMo is coming to its climactic end. With the coming of the end of the semester, and more importantly, time for me to work on things, I have been thinking quite hard about what I want to do with my novelling. Dragon Dance, for how much I like it, is sadly no where complete, and honestly, is so riddled with bad writing and plot holes that I think anyone reading it may go into seizures. So, I've once again decided that I am going to work on Resonance for my first book. Quite frankly, I miss the characters from Resonance, I knew them a lot better than the ones that just kept randomly appearing in Dragon Dance. It took me weeks just to get Reiki (DD main character) to not be a cardboard cut out of a human.

Not to say that NaNo has not been a good experience for me. It has given me lots to work with, especially on writing to hit a deadline.

Onto other happenings, the website is pretty much done! If you haven't already done so, hop over to http://www.InfiniteWinds.com and check out the new site layout and the three short stories I've put up from Sigma Tau Delta conventions past. Also, the Sigma Tau Delta Theta Zeta chapter and blog are updated, you can find them respectively at http://www.uwec.edu/sigtaude/ and http://sigtaudeltatz.blogspot.com/.

More on Dragon Dance

Well, as we progress into the month of November, I think it is proper that I give away a bit of the story about Dragon Dance.

How I got the idea for it-
 I sketched some kid's face with a horrific mask over it in the shape of an oriental dragon's horns. Kinda ended up going off of that (the mask shows up later in the book).

Some of the characters-
 Well, Reiki is the main character of the story. In the beginning of the novel, he gets poisoned with dragon's blood in place of his father, and ends up almost dying. He survives, although his hair and eyes change color. He ends up getting kicked out of his parent's house and living on the streets for a few years, until Ikki, current master of the Dragon Dance style of sword fighting picks him up and turns him into his apprentice. Reiki is a very interesting character to write, he has almost a split personality with next to no conscience about his actions, however, he is very just.
 The next character is Master Ikki, who is completely crazy. He tends to give his apprentice quite a few meaningless tasks to complete, and tends to ramble on about completely worthless topics.
 One of the characters I just came up with is Kurotora, aka Black Tiger (yes, geeky name). He's a kid that Reiki ends up saving, who was genetically engineered by one of the Lords in the story (more on those in a future post). Kuro seems to be a shy person who tries to avoid confrontation, however, he has an attitude towards others that  he tends to hide. Since Reiki rescued him, Kuro will do just about anything for him.

The setting-
 Earth, in the future. Still working out a lot of the details, however, the place the story happens in is a very large city surrounded by a forest.

Where I'm at-
I managed to write 5000 words so far today (I still have another hour to get more done!), bringing me up to a total of 21,078. I'm still behind, but starting to catch up!

50,000 Words in 30 days

If you keep up with this blog, you'll know that lately most of my posts have just been about what I'm doing, namely focusing on this little thing called NaNoWriMo.
This blog post is going to be a little bit different. I'm going to write a bit about keeping up with word count, and the true meaning behind a rough draft.
So, you have a story idea. You go into November, armed only with an outline, a couple of rough character sketches, and your trusty laptop. And you find that you are falling behind on words. That 1667 words per day has become a monster, a final boss that you have to challenge.
And you can defeat it!
NaNoWriMo, in addition to being a great writing exercise, is perhaps the best way I have found to teach yourself the true meaning behind a rough draft.

Rough drafts are meant to be just that: Rough.
I never really believed in the school of writing really rough drafts. I always paused over sentences, phrases, and you know that one word that always manages to stay just out of your grasp? Yeah, all of those, combine, were my greatest enemies.
NaNoWriMo makes you reach beyond that. It forces you to realize that even though you are a writer, not everything that you write is going to be amazing. In fact, not even any of it that you should write is going to be an amazing best-seller on your first try. Having to write 1667 words in a day requires you to throw away all inhibitions about whether or not the word you use is the perfect word for your character's action. You don't just "hmm" and "hahhh" about whether its the right word, you just write it and hope for the best!
So, in closing, I suppose that there should be a moral to this story, and the moral is right as rough a draft as you can. Otherwise, 1667 words will take you all day to write.

NaNoWriMo

Ugh, just a quick blog post in case there are any readers out there I don't know who are following me as I try to hash my way through NaNo. During the last week, things exploded, and I have now fallen behind by over 2 days worth of writing o.O
Le Gasp!
But, if there were no drama, it would not make a good story, no?
So, I'm taking off the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in order to procure another day that is strictly for writing, along with having Thanksgiving day full of writing.
We'll see how things work, but I will have 50,000 words by the end of the month, no matter how little sleep I get the last week.

The beginning of a novel

So, as the clock slowly ticks down the final hour of freedom before the beginning of NaNoWriMo, I want to take a moment to once again go over the insanity of the coming month.
First off, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. You write a 50,000+ word novel in 30 days, beginning midnight November 1st and ending 11:59 November 30th. That averages out to 1667 words per day, or approximately 6.667 pages per day at 250 words per page (what you typically see in a trade paperback).
This is the first year I am actively partaking in NaNo, and I will updating *coughs* okay, procrastinating on here and the NaNo forums.
The title of the novel I'm going to write is tentatively Dragon Dance, and if you keep a watch on this blog, I'll be revealing some nice little tidbits about the story and characters. I'll start out with the main character.

Reiki
Gender-Male
Age-approximately 21
Main Character of the story
Likes- Foxes, spicy food, spices, meat
Dislikes- Anything sweet, pigeons, birds, masks, pigeons, waking up early, bright lights, pigeons
Has Ornithophobia, especially around pigeons

The name of the city where everything happens is Alra. The world is based mostly on our wonderful world with a few modifications, most noticeably is the inclusion of random magical and supernatural aspects. And laws that allow the wielding of weapons in public.

The tentative rating on this story is  going to be a little higher than my normal stories, I typically say 13+, but this time around I'm going 16+ just to be on the safe side. I'm not entirely certain how it will turn out, hence the upped rating, but we'll have to wait and see how it all turns out!