Hello all!
It’s been a fall, hasn’t it? With all the insanity and warm weather, it seems like we’ve had two months of September. Personally, I could do with a more fall-like fall. Around here, this week finally feels like October. Still have tomatoes and peppers in the garden. Frost can’t be too far off, but who knows with this year — it might be mid-November before we truly get a freeze.
Every year some proportion of Write On folk from weekly stalwarts to quiet lurkers embark in November on that [supply your own adjective] endeavor to write 50k words in 30 days. We cheer on the folks who publicly throw their hats in and provide a tiny bit of accountability for those willing to post their word counts in the comments.
If you’re a planner, how’s it going? Lots of preparation percolating among the pumpkins?
If you’re a pantser (aka — writing by the seat of your pants, not outlining, seeing where the story will take you), do you have a hook or a scene you’re thinking of using as a jumping off point? (tiny, tiny bit of planning, yes)
Eleven days until go-time...
For the rest of us, what’s your current project or a project you have in the back of your mind?
I’m still plugging away on my first novel project. Now that I’m at 43k words, give or take, I’m pretty sure what I have is the middle section of a three part book, so I’m aiming to have the middle 50k done by the end of November at the very latest. Would be nice to have it done by the end of October, but I’m not sure that’s going to be happening. I have roughly three chapters left to round it out and leave my characters in a terrible lurch. Wish me luck! If I do finish before the end of November, I’ll be going back through and adding more scenes from side plot POVs so I can keep hold of the threads of those stories.
What about Wonderbook?
Some years ago, I signed up for Maria Popova’s BrainPickings email newsletter. Eventually I took myself back off because I recognized that I was buying books that I couldn’t afford (at that point) and not reading them. It was an expensive way to acquire an aspirational TBR pile. One book that hasn’t been read but also hasn’t been shuffled off to the local used bookstore is Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer.
Why haven’t I read this book? Erm, I did buy it when I was in grad school for science, not creative writing, so it was always going to be a ‘guilty treat’ sort of book, but along the way I was also diagnosed as having ADHD, and boy howdy, does this book trigger it. I get that it’s supposed to activate your creative juices, but I can hardly focus on a page. Too much going on for the most part. And now, I’ve left it so long that to really engage with it, I will need to get those progressive lenses my eye doc and I talked about this year. Heh.
To me, it looks less like a book than a book-length magazine, with lots of semi-related blurbs/’ads’ interspersing the main text. So perhaps if I think of it in that sense, maybe I can get through a chapter here and there.
I’ve trawled through the book, and seeing as the writing challenges are all visual, I’m abbreviating one from later in the book because I was able to find an online pic of the work in question:
Writing Challenge:
Make some decisions about this image — is the setting realistic, fantastical, surreal? What kind of cause-and-effect might be at play here? What are the creatures lying dead on the ground? [diarist’s note: are they really creatures/dead anyway???] Is the city fleeing or in the middle of being destroyed?
Write a scene including some sort of rationale for what you see here. Feel free to bring your Togwogmagog characters to it or invite some new characters to play. Aim for 250 words if you like.
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