cornerofmadness

It's been a long three days of grading and writing exams but at nearly 11 pm I am done except for the final touches on Tuesday's exam plus three simple online assignments to grade and oh grading finals of course.

I wanted to talk a bit about what I learned in this year's nano because it is good at teaching things.

1. I suck at outlining. It took about 3 minutes to realize my outline was utterly non-viable so back to pantsing it was.

2. That if I go slowly I can keep up with accents or character flaws etc but when I go fast I lose everything. All I do is writing page after page of dialogue. I am left with nearly 50K of no description, spotting world building, no character development, weasel words and tons of decent dialogue. It leaves me with so much work to do.

3. That I'm beginning to fear I've lost my ability to write females for some reason. The last I liked was Reanna and Melantha nd before them Tazia and that's been a few years. Solan was supposed to be one of the three main leads and frankly I could pull her out of the story and lose very little.

4. As far as this nano's concerned, I can't figure out motivations for almost any of the characters and without that how can I have any tension? characters with depth? Cam was easy, he wants to stay free and not be made into a killing tool. But Solan and Tenaldi, what do they want? Where are their stakes? This is where I get sad that blogging is half dead and there isn't the group to talk these things out with because that truly helps me.

5. That I CAN write 50K in a month and since I barely wrote 50K all year that means I really do just piss away time and that makes me very angry at myself.

6. I do have two story ideas (nothing like concentrating on one story to give birth to bunnies). One : based a little on the idea in the Abney Park song I posted. Mages with the ability to sing things into creation and the story centers on a young mage who's had his throat cut Two- a contemporary/paranormal for Jana, a mourning bisexual author who lost a son to cancer (and his marriage with it) gets himself a cabin in the woods to research hauntings in the area for the next book and meets a nautralist? ecology Professor? Set it here.

I still haven't added up all my word count.


And I majorly need to catch up on all the great links Betty has sent but here, have this week's crop.

What Makes a good ending God knows I could use this.

I debated putting up this one. It would carry more weight if it a) came from an agent or b) wasn't the same thing I've seen before but some of it is good. What Agents want

Flawed characters

Writing from inside the characters

I thought this one was really interesting. Subversive heroes (and it reminds me I really DO want to write that prophecy comes true and she is called to action story where the prophecy doesn't come true until she's like 60 or 70)

And here's today's musical advent calendar. I love Damh the Bard's work and this cover of the Lady in Black was the seed for this year's nano. This is basically Cam's theme song and how he ended up being turned into an immortal warrior.