Sheila Rambles

Steven Pressfield's The War of Art is one of my personal creative scriptures. The eBook is available for purchase and if you buy it between now and Thursday, October 21, 2010, it will be a mere $1.99. Buy it. Now. Even if you don't have an e-reader, you can grab it as a PDF. You can thank me later. http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2010/10/two-days-only-war-of-art-ebook-for-1-99/

I first signed up for NaNoWriMo in the year 2004, and started a novel called Sam and Charlie Go On A Roadtrip , which was about two girls, Samantha (Sam) and Charlotte (Charlie) who took a roadtrip down to Florida. I stalled out at 8,881 words. My usual line is that I got my characters as far as Florida and got stuck. I've been told that Florida has a reputation for that sort of thing, but there were other factors involved. 1. Not actually having a plot in mind. The novel was written as alternating diary entries and I figured that just rambling about travel from place to place would be an easy way to rack up words. Wrong. That's not even what we read novels for, anyway--we pick up books and keep reading them because we want to know what happens next. If there's no tension, no conflict and no potential gain or loss, there's nothing to drive things forward. I almost made the same mistake in 2005, starting on a fantasy story that was supposed to be somebody dictating...

National Novel Writing Month is less than a month away. The good news is, last night I just got clobbered over the head with an idea that should work very easily within the demands of that particular event. The better news is, I've got a month to ponder the possibilities before committing anything to the page, so I should be ready to hit it as soon at November 1 rolls around. The, um, not so good news is that I'm still logjammed at about 23,000 words on my current project and I'm not sure I'll be able to wrap it up by the end of this month. I think I may just do what I can in the remaining time and then shelve it while I plow through NaNo and then return to it in December. (One of the luxuries of being as-yet-unpublished is that I can do things like this without sending editors into cold sweats. Though, speaking of, I do need to get my other manuscript packed up and sent out again. Two rejections is hardly enough to prove the thing useless.) I am encouraged by th...