Hello, writers.
Here you are! ...laden with the lassitude of too much feast to focus, or nearly out on your feet from pulling a double-shift covering for revelers who used accrued vacation to ditch work a day early. Yet here you are nae’tha’less. Me, too. Our fearless leader, SensibleShoes, is carousing with family and will be back next week.
Tonight, there’s something I’m curious to ask you in a minute. First, let’s have wordcounts so far from WriteOn’s derring-doers in the home stretch of National Novel Writing Month, and we’ll correct/revise for new numbers as they’re posted in the comment thread:
bonetti— 55,456.
Cassandra Waites— 20,000
dconrad— 28,419.
Eihenetu— 3,911
mettle fatigue— 2,056
miracle11— 3,300
Mnemosyne— 750
terrypinder— 12,677
urban unicorn—
SensibleShoes says you discover a lot about your own methods and creative process in shooting for whatever daily number of words, pages, or hours you chose. Or whatever revising, layering (last week’s WriteOn), experimentation, or etc on that MS that had cooled enough on the back-burner by November 1.
For anyone who didn’t jump in who’d like to, or who wants to grab for the brass ring again, the first annual DailyKosNoWriMo will be January, right here in WriteOn.
Yes!
Meanwhile, tonight, my question is, what is/are your favorite resource[s] on the bookshelf where you are? The actual bookshelf, not a virtual one.
Dictionaries of all kinds, thesauri, how-2-rite-gud books by authors or teachers whose expertise knocks our socks off, are just the beginning of what writers often collect.
Then there’s…
...the volumes we look in to just check something, and get so absorbed that we keep turning the next page, and the next.
...the tomes we just like seeing being there.
...the faithful helpers through insomniac hours or politically-induced despair.
...the series we reread from start to finish by publishing date —and then re-reread in their fictional chronological order— from sheer impatience ‘til the newest in the series is released.
---the sparkplugs we can rely on to juice up our energies or inspire audacious solutions for a protagonist’s predicament!
I used to drift into used-book emporiums and fundraiser booksales something fierce, emerging the lighter of pocket, but richer in a chance-met encyclopedia of costume or weapons, a reprinted cookery book from colonial times, artist-illustrated speculations on extra-terrestrial habitats, scouts’ instructions for nautical and landlubber knots and lashings, an anthropologist’s meditation on daily life in an isolated Arabian oasis, photoessays on Japanese gardens, a battered old copy of a favorite author’s first novel that she’s tried to suppress every since — they saw me coming a mile away. Sometimes I even bought this or that brand new!
And you? What’s your favorite stuff on the shelves? Please spill!
Oh, you want A Challenge also or instead? Hm. Okay, how’s this:
Surfeited on pecan-sweet-potato pie, you awake at midnight to a sense of something amiss in your domain. Arming yourself with a spare turkey leg and the last blazing beeswax candle left from the feast, you advance into the livingroom.
Where you espy your protagonist, deep in argument with your bookshelves. It’s a battle royale! Should you shut it down? Should you lurk and take notes? Should you join in?
Write a vignette, wordcount at your discretion.
Alternate/additional challenge/wrinkle: you have houseguests who may or may not be light sleepers… ;-)
Write On! will be a regular Thursday night feature until it isn’t. Before signing a contract with any agent or publisher, please be sure to check them out on Preditors and Editors, Absolute Write and/or Writer Beware.