Wow! So roughly twelve hours ago I decided to embark on a quest to seek out other writers in an attempt to find fellow struggling writers such as myself and give them support. What an awesome community us writers have! The quick comments and follows I’ve received back have been overwhelming and quite frankly made me eager to get back to my computer to see what has been happening! I went from my life time views being around thirteen hundred to over fifteen hundred in that short twelve hour span! My views have exploded and with like minded people! It’s all I could have hoped for! So thank you so much for your support and for all of you who have now followed me, you have my attention! If you need/want/would like anything, and I mean ANYTHING read or just want to chat, feel free to drop me a line!
Also, for those of you stuck during NaNoWriMo, I applaud you. Writing fifty thousand words on a deadline can be stressful and soul crushing. But from my own personal experience with the “Fifty Thousand Words of Doom” I can honestly say do not stress. If you don’t meet your target it is not the end of the world. NaNoWriMo in spirit is to give us writers a reason to get tapping away at those keys and unite us with a common cause; to celebrate the art of writing. People tend to think, “Oh woe is me, I have failed” when in reality, the fact they are writing at all is a success. The only failed writers are the ones who lose passion for writing altogether, so do not let the stress of NaNoWriMo kill your passion. If you need someone to check up on you, I dare you to keep me up to date with your word counts… maybe I’ll even post them here, MWA HA HA! Public shame! (For a good cause :P)
I am so amped up on life right now! Having this much interaction on my blog has really struck me and I have procrastinated most other duties I had for today just to rush back to this very page and speak to you all again! I haven’t been this excited about writing in a long time and I really hope that I can share my wins with you as I myself struggle to get the fabled published book. Because I’ve been so inspired, I must indeed rush off and get back to it and today I leave you with one of my oldest surviving pieces of writing (everything else was lost to floppy disk failures, failure to back up or the fabled room flooding) but here is my first published poem in a compilation from high school (Oh God, that was just over a decade ago…) aptly named, Not Quite Nostalgic (I’ve posted this awhile ago, but it still holds a special place in my heart). Hope you enjoy and stay tuned… I’ve got some wild ideas coming up! Exciting times ahead!
Thanks again everyone! TJ – The Canuck Amuck
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Not Quite Nostalgic
A sea of hope, a beach of sand.
Some have never seen nor heard,
The whispering winds across the land.
Though I have seen many a time,
The lapping waves, in all their beauty,
Rising and falling, almost in rhyme.
The tide across the sandy beach,
No worries or cares, just silent sounds.
No lesson to learn, nor to teach,
Not quite nostalgic, yet my heart still pounds.
So cool you’ve had such a good response to your outreach! Thanks for stopping round my blog on the way. I wish you every success with your writing and hope you find a nice community to interact with. Looks like you’ve made a great start 🙂
Thanks for sharing your poem too. I found it peaceful and strangely poignant. Really enjoyed it.
I know, now the pressure is on to not only blog but to keep it high quality! I have enjoyed stopping by (not so random) blogs and seeing what other writers are up to! Thus far the response has been overwhelming but exciting! I find myself not thinking about video games, facebook or other such distractions… but entirely about writing both blog and novel!
Also, glad you enjoyed the poem! I never really thought I was strong at poetry but that one was one of my first stronger pieces (or at least one of the ones I liked!) I like that it is indeed peaceful and probably has more description than my novel! *Sigh* Oh the challenges! Thanks for stopping by! 😀
Nice job getting the response you hoped for, TJ. I hope you’ll help keep me writing after “Fifty Thousand Words of Doom” is over. That’s when I need the most poking and prodding and whatever else to keep me writing, novel, blog or otherwise. I post my word counts on my blog’s sidebar widget, so feel free to post and shame or applaud me. Every little bit helps. 🙂
Be careful what you wish for Nikki! I’ll definitely try and celebrate the wins with you as I progress further with the future of this blog. I’m enjoying its sudden evolution from writing to no one to a much more social writing atmosphere! And we all need a bit of poking and prodding here or there… I’ve finished writing a novel, but nearly refuse to edit it, it’s just hard!
Also my biggest struggle is how and when to put in descriptions. I can describe any of my characters down to a fine detail… but when it comes to my story, I hardly think that giving all those details makes sense. Especially in the context where people are dying and a war of magic is in full swing. I hardly think someone is going to go “Oh man, look at the buckles on his boots! They’re just so polished!”
If they do, they die. Simple as that 😛
Well, I happen to be GREAT at descriptions. I see the scene like it’s playing out as a movie in my head, and boy that helps. That’s probably why my first (and still in progress except for this month) work in progress is 400+ pages and still not complete. I’m on scene 8 and 20k, and haven’t even gotten to the big plot point yet!
Oddly enough, I have barely described my characters so far except maybe for a hair color here or there. It just hasn’t seemed like the right place for it. Yes, I know I could use the word count, but darn it, I want a good story too! 🙂
As for killing people off, by the end of the next scene just about every family my MC and her BF and his sister will have died. Gotta love hyena massacres… Ha.
See I can see the scene, I can describe the scene… but the story is driven by the characters, their experience and their dialogue. I’d probably do incredible at writing movie scripts, but where’s the fun in that?
I have barely described some of my characters too. I find that it simply slows down the narrative. Although, it would help with other scenes I’m sure, I just haven’t come across them yet! Right now I’m at the 85k word mark while editing and my story’s climax is reaching all out war so people have been dropping at an alarming rate. I’ve almost wanted to unkill some people just to have more people toward the end 😛 Guess thats why it wraps up in less than 10k words hahaha
A big chunk of my story is definitely dialog, so I’m with you there. But that dialog feeds into the scene. I describe what they’re doing while talking – pacing, gnashing teeth, laughing, primping, etc. – off the dialog tags. I think both of the Shifter Days excerpts I posted kind of show that.
I’ve always kind of worried I describe too much, or go into more detail than anyone cares about. I like to think of it as getting wrapped up in the story and going where it takes me. I just had my MCs come across a gruesome death scene that I thought was going to be bigger than it was. Yet I was able to get the point across in one scene. Progress? Maybe. Or I’m concentrating on the bigger picture. 🙂
See, I describe action fine… it’s the damn background that kills me! I cannot describe a city or a building or a room unless the protagonist has a vested interest in its details. Otherwise I ask myself… how is this helping my plot along? Cut it!
Also, never worry about describing too much, an editor will simply ask you to cut it down or out. Too much is a good thing, too little (Where I am) can be the difference between being published and well… not. I think I might be too focused on that bigger picture… could my 100k be a trilogy? If I add detail, that is a possibility!
Well, if too much is a good thing, then I have nothing to worry about, LOL. I did actually write some decent descriptions tonight, as my male MC was doing a room-by-room search and my readers needed to see what he was seeing. But it was just enough to get the picture made, and I moved on.
The best part? It helped get me to within 271 words of today’s goal. Yeehaw! 🙂
Awesome work! And if Tolkien is anything to judge by, more is not a bad thing. I mean he describes everything in such detail that it is as if the reader is walking through the world in a sense of wonder and looking around at everything.
But see, that description makes sense. I struggle with the way Tolkien introduces it and I introduce it bit by bit through the characters, but the focus is always the dialog and the action. In all honesty my story could be set in the future or the past except for a few key things (wagons, horseback riding etc…) that set it in the past. It frustrates me and if you read my story Circle of Vengeance you’ll understand!
Glad to be here! I’m also thrilled that the outpouring of support has inspired your muse too! 😀
Beautiful poem! I’m very happy to hear that you’re getting a lot of success in your endeavor to pool together a writing community. I hope it only grows and gets better! I look forward to your future posts. I haven’t been able to post as much on my blog because of NaNoWriMo, but I will always post my week’s progress, any tips I’ve found to be helpful, and even my thoughts on the pep talks (and what we can learn from them).
After that, expect to hear a lot about my writing and revision process of my novel.
Thanks in regards to the poem! So far it has already grown beyond my wildest dreams, I’m just hoping other people find it helpful for them and talk to other people within the comments on my blog! I’m excited to hear about your writing, I feel like I’m always talking about mine to whoever will listen because if I can find that one person who enjoys it as much as me then it was worth it!
Also, were the pep talks really useful? The book I’ve found the most useful because of the passion within its pages was Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing. That guy wrote, A LOT and loved every moment of it. I’d suggest it as it is a short read!