Bringer of Jollity

Jupiter, the Bringer of Jolliity - Holst

Day 3 of NaNo, and I'm at 11,000 words. You get the idea I might want to write this book?

I wanted to apologize to anyone who tried to register on www.ianthealy.com in the past few days and got frustrated with the CAPTCHA system. After numerous spambots started registering, I implemented CAPTCHA but didn't realize the graphic version would be so damn hard to read. Therefore, I've replaced it with a much more user-friendly Math-based CAPTCHA. I'd like to invite you all to come back and try again, and if you haven't registered yet for whatever reason, all I can say is you're missing a jolly read in Blood on the Ice's first draft.

You can almost feel the current flowing

Far Cry (Album Version) - Rush

NaNo - Day One word count: 6173. Not my best showing on the first day, but certainly respectable. I'm off on the daily grind until next weekend when I have more time to set aside and write another large chunk. Until then, you can follow along on the progress of what I'm writing at www.ianthealy.com, as long as you're registered as a member (which is free, easy, and takes only a minute of your time).

Engines pumping and thumping in time

The Distance - Cake

Saturday at midnight, the madness starts anew. I'm reposting my NaNo Survival Guide for you here.

Ten Tips to Surviving NaNoWriMo

Most writers have heard of the National Novel Writing Month contest, but most of us shy away from the notion that you can write a book in thirty days. “It can’t be done!” we cry. “We don’t have time! We can’t write that much! And what about the holidays and shopping and hockey season and football season and family and work and vacuuming the cat…?”

You get the idea.

Speaking as a five-time survivor (and winner) of NaNoWriMo, I’m here to tell you it not only can be done, but should be attempted by anyone who considers him- or herself a serious writer. The goal is simple: between 12:01 AM November 1^st and midnight November 30^th, you write a minimum 50,000-word book. That’s all. That’s 1,667 words a day, or about 7 pages typed double space.

Over the past five years, I’ve learned some tips and tricks to not only surviving, but thriving during NaNoWriMo, and I’d like to share those with you.

1. Turn off your internal editor.

You don’t have time to think about what you’re writing when you’re on this kind of deadline. Shut him or her up in a closet and just write. Don’t worry about gaping plot holes, inconsistencies, spelling, etc. You can fix all that starting in December. I promise.

2. Don’t fear the weird.

My NaNo books have traditionally been explorations for me outside of my normal writing comfort zone. I find it a conducive environment to the strange ideas which I would normally eschew in favor of “safe” concepts.

3. Break up your writing time.

Writing seven pages at one sitting can be a daunting task, especially if (like me) you’re saddled with work, family, and your two favorite sports playing three to four times a week. But what if you write one page in the morning before work, one page on your lunch break, one page before you start dinner? Take your laptop into the bathroom and write a page there. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to rattle out 250 words here and there and before you know it, you’ve hit your daily quota and then some.

4. Go to bed early and get up early to write.

I know, I know. Nobody wants to drag themselves out of bed at 4 AM to write. But I do it in November, because I can get more work done in those first 2 hours of the day than I can any other time – no work, no family interruptions, nothing but write, write, write.

5. Turn off the internet.

It’s the biggest distraction in the world. I love using wikipedia for quick research, but it’s too easy to start clicking links and then deciding to check blogs and oh, what about facebook? And say, that video looks interesting. And before you know it, you’ve wasted two hours playing instead of working.

6. Give yourself play time.

Playing is therapeutic, and believe me, you’re going to need the stress-relief during a month of intensive writing. So don’t begrudge yourself the four hours on the Wii or the Peter Jackson film festival, so long as you’ve made your quota.

7. Explain to your family what you’ll be doing before November begins.

Get them excited for you. That way when you tell your spouse or significant other or children to let you have your writing time, they’ll understand. If they don’t, I suggest duct tape as an alternative solution.

8. Make outlandish bets that you will succeed.

Nothing will get you back to your writing desk better than the threat of having to wear a gorilla suit to work for a week.

9. Use little rewards to stay on task.

Got leftover Halloween candy? Have a piece every time you finish a page. It won’t help your figure, but if you’ve got a sweet tooth it can be a great motivation. Feel free to forgo your diets in favor of microwaveable entrees, coffee, and ramen noodles for the duration of November. Except for Thanksgiving, of course, when you have a four-day weekend to get a ton of writing done.

10. Have fun.

Remember, nobody is grading you on your work. Nobody is going to point and laugh (unless you have to wear a gorilla suit for a week). You’re giving yourself a 50,000-word jump start on your next book. It’s a rough first draft, but you’ll have 50,000 more words than when you started the month. And, like anything else you write, you can edit it until it’s worth showing around after the month is done.

For more information, visit www.nanowrimo.org or email me at ian@ianthealy.com. Good luck and keep on writing, everyone!

Let's play wild like wildcats do

Tall Cool One (2006 Remastered LP Version) - Robert Plant

NaNoWriMo starts in exactly one week and just under twelve hours as I write this post. Since I'm between projects at the moment, I've used the past couple of days to keep my writing muscles sharp by penning the first part of a Steampunk tale, which has been a recent reading interest of mine.

If you're unfamiliar with the genre of Steampunk, I would define it at its simplest as anachronistic technology introduced into a 19th-Century setting. Recent examples would include some of the gizmos in the excellent show Warehouse 13 (currently done with its first season) like the Tesla ray gun, the Farnsworth video communicator, and the Edison electric automobile. Steampunk is H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Steamboy, Castle in the Sky. It's steam-powered mechanical men, airships like naval battleships, and ... rockets.

And of course, the stories are not simply about the technology, but about how the advanced tech has affected the lives of the characters within the stories, because we'd all rather read stories about people instead of things. Here's a taste of my own tale, with a working title of Ad Venus, Fidens (To Venus, Fearlessly):

‘Twas the day before Christmas, and a fine day for rocketry. The fellows and I had gathered in a snow-covered cow pasture to the east of Denver, with our needles of steel and iron, wood and bamboo, ready to challenge the rarefied heights of the wintry air.

Gwen and the boys sat in the wagon, wrapped up in wool blankets and scarves, sipping at hot cider from the Youngs’ stove. My wife’s cheeks were red from the bracing cold of the morning, but she smiled gamely at me as I set up my projectile, a Hale rocket with fourteen pounds of caked fuel between nose cone and the bell-shaped exhaust nozzle. The gantry was giving me fits; I’d dropped at least three bolts into the snow and was wet through the knees of my trousers from hunting for them.

You're an angel with wings afire

Supernova (Explicit) - Liz Phair

I finished the fourth draft of Pariah's Moon this past weekend. I've sent it off to a few select members of my inner circle for a final round of critiques before shipping it off to my agent. I'm hoping she'll find it both a pleasant surprise and an unusual change of pace from my superhero/cyberpunk action adventurey stuff.

With eleven days remaining until NaNo starts, what am I working on? Mostly busy-type work. I'm getting synopses (although I prefer synopsii because I love dual "I"s) ready for and Pariah's Moon and The Archmage since I never got around to doing that before. I need to mail a hard copy of Archmage to my agent. I may just wait until after PM is ready and send both at the same time. Besides that, I'm doing some plotting work on Blood on the Ice, getting ready to start it on November 1. I also need to get my webcomic queue stretched into December, because I'm not going to be working on it next month, so that will be my project for next weekend.

This ain't no fooling around!

Life During Wartime (Live LP Version) - Talking Heads

Breaking news!!

My short story, The Scent of Rose Petals, is scheduled to appear in the Fall 2009 issue of The Journal of A Thousand Faces. I'll make another announcement when it comes out. When it does, why not click over to their store and order yourself a copy? They're inexpensive and chock full of darn good stories (and not just mine, either).

Come around to my way of thinkin'

Sister Havana - Urge Overkill

I've been thinking about plotting versus seat-of-the-pantsing today. I am, and have always been, a pantser. That means I keep plot details in my head instead of writing down and sticking to an outline. I tend to write with the major plot in my mind, but mainly focus on writing toward the next scene. I think ahead, certainly, in terms of climaxes and pitfalls and such, but mostly focus on the immediacy. What gets me stuck is when I write point A, need to get to point C, and can't figure out what point B will be. If I was a plotter, a planner, an outliner, I wouldn't have that problem; I'd already have points B ad infinitum worked out. I'm trying to plan my upcoming NaNoWriMo project (which I've never done before) because I have more gray areas in this one than I normally do. It's been, uh, challenging, to say the least. I'm working with yWriter, and hopefully it will help me to get my scattered thoughts into some kind of order.

In the meantime, I've worked out the narrative voice for Blood on the Ice, and to that end, I'd like to share with you these two opening paragraphs which I will build upon to create a novel:

You see that? The glint in his eyes? That's the cold, steely gaze of a killer. If it was ten thousand years ago, he'd be hunting woolly mammoths with nothing more than a spear and balls the size of coconuts, if coconuts were made of stainless steel. Our story is a little more recent than that, and his spear is a hooked stick of graphite with a wicked curve at the bottom, and although he's still got balls like coconuts, the stainless steel is on the blades under his feet.

I present for your consideration our hero, one Hamisch Hamlisch, the first line right winger of the Fort McWilliams Fighting Aardvarks and the owner of the most unfortunate name combination since Boutros Boutros-Ghali.