Archive for the ‘Novels’ Category

101 Things in 1001 Days

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Yeah, I’m a sucker for these things.

Also on Skippy’s blog was a reference to 101 things in 1001 days, a long-term goals project focusing on doing a set list of things in the ensuing 1001 days precisely. For me, the end date is going to be Friday, 5 October 2012 (calculated using this tool). That’s shortly before the Mayan apocalypse, right?

Anyway, I have finished my list and here it is! I’ll be ticking them off as I go.

  1. Get a full-time job that I don’t hate
  2. Read the Hitchhiker’s Guide series
  3. Make one new local offline friend
  4. Quit Woolworths (in conjunction with #1)
  5. If I can’t buy a house yet, at least save up $10,000+
  6. Get down to 85kg or lighter, and keep it that way
  7. Get the matching tattoos my sister and I have been planning since we were in England
  8. Actually edit a NaNoWriMo novel
  9. Try to get novel published
  10. Hold the “plank” exercise for 60 seconds or more
  11. Go to the gym twice in one day
  12. Go to the gym every day from Monday-Saturday (it’s closed Sundays) for at least one week
  13. See a psychiatrist about my anxiety
  14. Have my gonadectomy
  15. Release the first issue of Ather & Earth
  16. Visit New Zealand
  17. Go on a road trip
  18. Go to the beach and go in the water (you’d think this would be an easy one, considering I live right by a beach… but I just never go)
  19. Get up early enough to watch the sun rise over the lake
  20. Pay off my Barter Card balance and close my account
  21. Learn to use a Javascript library
  22. Own a smart phone, preferably a Google one
  23. Visit the Blue Mountains
  24. Find out if I’m allergic to any food
  25. Have a shift at Woolworths where I do not want to scream in frustration
  26. Go one day without coffee
  27. Go two days without using a computer or video game of any kind
  28. Go one month where I work on Ather & Earth every single day.
  29. Go a month without buying anything made of chocolate or chocolate flavoured or containing chocolate
  30. Settle into a smooth weekly routine
  31. Drink 2 litres of water in one day
  32. Earn over $40k in one year
  33. Radically change my hair
  34. Spend a night out without having a panic attack
  35. Cook a gourmet meal on my own
  36. Connect my computer to my TV to become a Media Centre
  37. Buy better wheels for my rollerskates
  38. Quit playing Bejeweled
  39. Visit 24 hour K-Mart between 1am and 4am, just ’cause
  40. Visit Jamberoo Action Park
  41. Buy a DSLR camera
  42. Move to a bigger house
  43. Be complimented on my home by a visitor
  44. Drink a large Boost Juice
  45. Catch and eat a fish
  46. Get a perfect score on Rhythm Kung Fu (Advanced) in Wii Fit Plus
  47. Refrain from eating anything sugary on Christmas Day
  48. Buy that Beatles collection on the USB flash drive in the green apple
  49. Make delicious cocktails at home
  50. Roast green coffee beans in a popcorn maker
  51. Watch all Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes
  52. Buy a block of chocolate and eat it over the space of a week rather than all at once
  53. Win something. Anything.
  54. Finish at least the first draft of at least two novels
  55. Get my car’s headlights fixed
  56. Build a new shoe rack
  57. Learn how to use the washer-dryer properly
  58. Go one month without seeing an insect or arachnid in the house
  59. Go on a waterslide
  60. Get a kitten
  61. Meet three people in person that I met online
  62. Clean up my Gmail and keep up with all the emails instead of just looking at them all, sighing, and closing the tab
  63. Visit Uluru
  64. Get revenge on someone
  65. Bake fresh bread
  66. Go to bed at 9:30pm
  67. Spend a full day exclusively in bed except for using the bathroom
  68. Make a really horribly designed website for fun
  69. Live in the Greater Wollongong area
  70. Eat a taco
  71. Brew stout beer
  72. Make tiramisu
  73. Find a cake wreck and submit it to Cake Wrecks
  74. Make steak and stout pot pies
  75. Consider myself a responsible adult
  76. See Melbourne when it’s sunny
  77. Finish Final Fantasy V
  78. Feel financially secure
  79. Skate backwards for three laps at the skating rink
  80. Make scouse
  81. Make Irish soda bread
  82. Make soda bread ice cream
  83. Go to Bowral
  84. Borrow a book from the local library
  85. Make real buttermilk pancakes topped with sliced strawberries and pure maple syrup
  86. See the New Years fireworks in Sydney Harbour
  87. Have a picnic on the grass
  88. Wander the Haywards Bay home display village
  89. Take my parents out to dinner
  90. Learn how to take care of my car properly
  91. Make a sand sculpture
  92. Visit Caringbah Shopping Village for the first time since 2007
  93. Eat at Outback Steakhouse
  94. Buy a deck of Uno cards
  95. Visit the Southern Gateway Centre
  96. Walk on the Sea Cliff Bridge
  97. Stay awake for 35 hours straight, and see if I start hallucinating
  98. Get some new bedroom décor
  99. Make an animated short
  100. Eat at the Nan Tien Temple
  101. Go hang-gliding

Drawing the Line First Draft: Complete!

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
NaNoFiMo 2008 WinnerWinner’s badge I created.

I got stuck into it nice and early today, and I’m proud to say that the first draft of my first ever novel, is now complete! Exactly in the timeframe I was shooting for, too.

The grand total word count is 121,601, at least according to yWriter. This is an incredible milestone. Not long ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed I could actually pull something like this off. I thought I was far too lazy to keep chipping away at something so enormous. And yet, I did 121k in just two months.

Now, by all accounts, the best thing to do is let a fresh batch of novel cool for at least a month before starting on the editing. It makes sense, because I view my current novel as a piece of crap not worth touching right now anyway. In a month or so, I will be able to view it objectively and edit it as such. I’ve never edited a story before (presumably why I was always marked badly in creative writing at school), so I’ll be borrowing a book about it from the library. I have the gist of what I should be doing, but mainly plotwise. The quality of writing, I will likely need help with to some extent. Probably one of my biggest pitfalls is that I don’t read much fiction. It’s pretty good for originality (no plagiarism from me), but very bad for sentence construction, ideas for similes and metaphors, dialogue, that kind of thing. I think I did a decent job for someone who read The Mists of Avalon by Marion Bradley a few years ago, then didn’t pick up a single piece of fiction until midway through November this year (I read Playing For Keeps by Mur Lafferty, by the way).

But anyway, it’ll still be quite some time before this novel is ready for the public eye. But I will keep you updated.

So… Close…

Monday, December 29th, 2008

The climax of my novel is part way through. Believe me, it is going to need desperate amounts of editing. I cannot stress that enough. I have this horrible feeling that the editing is going to end up more man hours than the initial draft.

Nevertheless, I am about 98% complete. It feels so close, and yet it’s so hard to figure it out. See, I’ve outlined up to the end of this scene I am now writing. But I need to work out what happens afterwards, which is probably an important part of the meshing of the story. Well, we’ll see what happens.

Haven’t worked on the comic in a few days, sadly. But once the novel is out of the way it’ll be much easier to work on.

The End?

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

Well, that’s the last time I use the WordPress “QuickPress” box on the Dashboard – I clicked “Save Draft” and my last post disappeared into thin air. Joy.

Anyway, I will try to recover the post as it was stored in my fallible human hard drive (also known as my “brain”). Ahem.

So, in keeping with my vow to finish the first draft of my novel before New Year’s, Drawing the Line is coming to its non-red-herring climax. Hurrah! Basically a chapter to go, or around 4,000 words. If I keep up what I did today, 1.8k, I’ll be done on the 30th. I will be finished by New Years.

Having said that, my climax is really hard to write now. My characters have developed beyond their original motivations when I planned this scene in detail two long months ago. Le sigh. Well, filling plot holes is a job for future drafts. My main mission is to get this junk out, despite my utter annoyance with it. I am so sick of writing this novel, you have no idea. I like my characters, but I am sick of describing all their actions and thoughts. They’re real enough in my head now that it seems like they’re lazy in that they’re making me write their stupid story, instead of them doing it.

On the NaNoWriMo forums, people kept talking about their characters as real people that had personalities and spoke to them in their head. I’m starting to understand it. But my characters are uncooperative. They keep willing me to stop writing about them doing heroic things. They just want to run away and hide. Screw you guys!

Do I sound crazy yet? I think writers need to have a crazy streak… writing begets crazy, and crazy begets writing. The circle of storytelling spins for eternity. Or something.

Slacker!

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Yesterday I totally slacked off.

I procrastinated SO HARD, I actually spent most of my time marking every spam page in the AVENwiki. Then I played the Spicks and Specks board game with Allyson for a long while.

Ended up only writing about 800 words on my novel (I started AFTER MIDNIGHT, mind you), and nothing else on any other projects.

I hope to do far more today.