Falling Behind

One week in (okay, it's 11/09, but I'm rouding down and calling it a week) with NaNo and I am falling behind: have lurched past the 10K mark word-count-wise, but am in dire need of inspiration and ideas. Still hoping to slug it out with the word count and see what pops up during the process, but even if I hit 50K it sure isn't gonna look anything like a novel. I just don't seem to be in the groove this year, and am now distracted by news from home about a health challenge that has taken a deeply scary turn for the worse. It's hard to feel creative with that lurking in the background. Perhaps if I had a plot worked out I could focus on a specific scene and write my way into not thinking about the bad stuff. But staring at a blank page, feeling sad and worried... nuh uh, not working out so well today.

What I Did This Summer

You already know that I moved. That was the big time-energy-money-attention monster that ate the first part of the summer. Since my last post I also:

~ Caught up on many bookkeeping/admin tasks. Much of my time goes to that, but it's not really worth mentioning here. Don't know why I've even typed this much about it.

~ Ate too many Hurricane Cookies, leading to thrice-weekly morning workouts with Jillian.

~ Renamed my "pre-published" novel: now "Lethal Blossom." Too soon to say how well that name will stick, but I'm liking it well enough.

~ Consulted my wonderful astrologer about an auspicious day to send out query letters to my most-desired agents list: turned out to be Aug. 17 at 10am, so I twiddled my thumbs and tweaked and retweaked and retweaked my letter/synopsis until I had to just stop looking at it.

~ Sent out query letters/etc. to said target agents on most-auspicious time/date, most by email, a few by snail post

~ Got three top-speed replies back: "Sorry, we're so busy with our current clients we don't look at submissions unless they've been blessed by the Pope, Stephen King, or Janet Evanovich." Such is life. I don't need 10 agents fighting over me, just one who really likes my stuff. Seven remain unheard from as of this writing, so that's still wide open.

~ Sent off for an entry form for the 2010 "Malice Domestic" competition. If no agent is delerious with excitement about my potential by Oct. 1, I'll give that a go.

~ Finally got around to joining Facebook.

~ Retrieved and reviewed my NaNoWriMo novel from 2005 -- the one that got set aside so I could write what is now "Lethal Blossom" (LB1)to which NaNovel '05 is the sequel. Much has changed during the writing of LB1, and much of NaNovel '05 is headed for a deadly encounter with the delete key. Fingers crossed there's enough left to give me a jump-start on a complete draft of the next one (working title "Lucky Bamboo" - LB2).

~ Got a Wordpress theme to use for my future author site. Don't have much of a clue yet what to do with it, but I'll be playing with that this fall when I need a break from working on LB2.

~ Downloaded a bunch of photos from Fotolia, for potential Wordpress site use.

~ Looked for free, interesting fonts online to use for Wordpress banner, maybe some headline graphics. Got as far as AbstractFonts, which is totally groovy, and only downloaded 37 of the 1019 in the "handwriting" category, which I think counts as remarkable restraint. It's trickier than you might think to find a font that's attractive and readable while also whispering "humorous mystery." Horror novelists have all the luck, as there are many fantabulous fonts that shriek of murder, mayhem, and madness. Not right for my stuff, though.

~ Oh, yeah. I also read a lot, as usual. And did some sewing.

Next up:

~ Try to remember how to install fonts so my font manager will recognize they're on the system.

~ Come up with some kind of a plot for LB2 before the end of October, in time for...

~ NaNoWriMo 2009. I may churn out nothing more than 50-60,000 (or more) words of drivel (it's happened before), but the group write-til-you-drop experience is too much fun to pass up.

Onward...

Plot Tangles

Crap. I've run into a problem.

I've been breezing along, cheerfully accumulating word count, inching closer to "the end" and, ouch. Just ran into a wall.

Or, more accurately, a plot tangle. I'm at the stage where my MC (and posse) are close to gathering together (more like stumbling over, most of the time) the various bits and pieces of clues that will point them to who done it. But I'm having a little trouble with the timing and sequence of information that leads to the aha moment and (simultaneously, if I manage to be clever enough to pull it off) reveals an interesting and significant subplot twist.

There's one tidbit that MC really should have on Sunday evening (in novel time), but as of now isn't going to have until next Tuesday. And then there's the info she uncovers on Sunday that would work better (in terms of other characters, scenes, etc) if it were delayed for a day or two.

You'd think I could just switch the two incidents, but no. It's not that easy.

So, I'm taking a day off (or several, hope it won't drag on too long) from word count accumulation for some plot detangling.

Best case scenario, I emerge from this with something resembling a scene outline for at least the next few days of novel time, which ought to (fingers crossed) speed up the race to "the end."

Wish me luck.

So Much For That Idea

Yikes, have two weeks really gone by since my last post? Uh oh. Have not made as much plotting progress as I'd hoped, although I've added some "fit this in somewhere" points to the "how the story works" list, have fleshed out the Ouija board scene to include essential plot points/info drops, and made other small progress.

But, having fallen into recreational reading the past few days, now must junk the "safe combo found in dropped/broken golf trophy" trick, which arose during '07 NaNoWriMo writing, and which I think was pretty neat. That's because early this morning, lounging on a deck chair with a mug of coffee, I finished reading Laura Lippman's Another Thing to Fall, and darn it, a key revelation comes to light when Lloyd drops the Emmy statuette and a hidden paper is revealed.

So, great minds think alike. Anyway, Laura got it into print first (no surprise there, question of if/when mine will ever see print still wide open) and recently, so I'll come up with something else. Since that's current in my mind today, maybe I'll focus on that rather than polishing the Ouija scene, which might benefit from a fresh look after some time away.