First Draft Done - Yay, Sooty!

As everyone who writes will know, there is no such thing as finished. One goes through and clears up one set of issues only to emerge at the end with a whole new set.

And thus it was with this first draft. I went through. I cross-checked and verified and inserted required information and elaborated where noted. And all the while I was compiling a list of further changes to make.

The first draft is done. And all that means is that I am now free to start on the second draft. But I am pleased -- and proud that I got it done.

Tomorrow I will be gone for the day, taking a hike around what has to be one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. If I'm not too tired tomorrow night, I will celebrate the first of September by diving into Adjacent Possibilities. All this month I have been jotting ideas for that story. I have a new opening in mind and I want to see if it'll work. I've been following a wonderful series of posts on ethics that have given me ideas for one of the characters. The book's philosophers focus on ethics and beliefs, you see.

So I will enter September actively editing two novels. The third? It haunts me. I wish I could accomplish more, but even five or six straight hours of work can't get me through enough pages: sometimes ten, sometimes twenty, sometimes two.

I am very tired, so I will have to add word count tomorrow.

And tomorrow I will celebrate. Tonight I will sleep!

Will I Meet My Goal By Midnight, 31 August?

I'm ending up down to the wire on this. I promised myself 70,000 words, one round of editing, and a whole-draft revision in one month.

I need more discipline. I have spent two days now trying to skim -- not read, but skim -- my way through the story to find all the notes for elaboration or insertion and get them worked out.  Instead, I find one, work on it, and proceed to edit and rewrite around it rather than move on.

Thus I have a first draft that is roughly complete, but has gotten its first round of editing in chunks.  Not sensible.

To be fair to myself, there have been an unanticipated abundance of interruptions.But then, isn't that one of life's most important and ironic lessons -- always plan for the unexpected.

I did better tonight, but am still only about one-third through the story. Tomorrow I will leave home, leave cats and people who distract me, and hole up to get this done. I must be able to say, truthfully, that I achieved my goal.

I am over the 70k goal, so I won't bother with word counts until I have the draft complete.

Researching a Novel

There always comes a point where I have to cope with all the "insert here" comments. In Adjacent Possibilities, that was, and still is, working in the philosophy that is integral to the characters' world views, in a palatable form for readers.

Tonight I've been working on the chemistry aspects of the Sooty story.

Sooty is a creature from another dimension. He cannot live on the naturally occurring elements we have. His world is more like the neutron soup of our just-post-Big Bang. He needs to combine and break apart atoms to simulate the energies he's familiar with. It has to be a mix of elements, as each one has a unique 'flavour' that helps sustain him, much like the variety of nutrients we need in our bodies to function, including tiny traces of metals.

Hey, it's the distinctly science fiction aspect of the story. I classify Sooty as speculative, though, as the science is adjunct to, and not the main purpose of the tale.

Anyways, I've been reabsorbing what chemistry I knew, and much that I've forgotten, and then making my own use of it to suit my goals (apologies to real chemists).  But it took many hours to get even the limited amount of factual information I required into story form.

Next is to go through for character consistency. The rereading that accompanied inserting chemistry revealed several major flaws. If Anna and Sooty manipulate her best friend, Tai's mind, I see that Anna has to tell Tai the truth eventually. How would I react if I found my best friend had controlled my thoughts? How would you?

I've got ideas jotted down, and hopefully tomorrow will get them into the story, along with other omissions.

So, mostly revising, or editing, or whatever you call it when you are sticking in the bits you avoided in the creation stage. But I have gotten two thousand more words in over the last two nights. Whee!

I will declare the first draft complete when I eliminate all the "insert here" or "expand this" notes. Of which there are far, far too many.

Humor For Sooty (and Chemistry)

Gotta love these. Lolcats has been running a series of Chemistry Cat jokes, and now Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets in on the act.

Chemistry is part of Sooty's story, you see. Again, I find synchronicity. When I work on Adjacent Possibilities, the world is full of philosophy, and when I work on Sooty, chemistry.

Of course, I know it's only that I notice these things because I'm thinking about them, but even that is good. It means I'm seeing things I wouldn't have noticed before.

Wonderful!

 (sorry about the overlap, but using a smaller size-option made this one unreadable)

Update 23 Oct, 2011  I was just going over old posts and saw this image had vanished. I can't get it to reload, so here's the direct link to the comic from its site's archives:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2349

Self-Deception

One of the themes that always pokes its way into my stories is integrity. Not being who you think you should be, or who you think others want you to be, but rather, finding who you truly are.

Facing facts is a tangent of that. And yet, self-delusion can be helpful. It gets us through times of hardship. "This, too, shall pass." "It's always darkest just before dawn," "Light at the end of the tunnel." Myriad proverbs to choose from, all telling us that we needn't give up hope, needn't face facts. Instead, we can adapt reality to make us comfortable.

So, we have to find a balance between accepting reality clearly enough that we can deal with life as it is, but not so bluntly that we become despairing or incapable of action.

My re-interpretation of reality was that I could write a novel in a month, including at least one thorough round of editing and revision, and then publish it as an ebook. I cheerfully announced that I would let it go, knowing it wouldn't be a good as it could be, because I need the satisfaction of having something 'finished' and out-there. Also, I need to learn how to get ebooks formatted for the various distribution sites.

My learning novel, I called it.

And now I find I cannot do it. Oh, I can have it written. I can revise it, too; I already am. I find I cannot write the outline that will facilitate said revisions without stopping to implement them. No self-restraint, alas. So I will meet those goals.

But -- I cannot put a book out into the world unless I make it something I'm proud of. So now I see myself with not just two novels in editing, but three.

I have to get back to Adjacent Possibilities. I've learned so much from the Sooty Experiment, and the editing will go more easily because of that. But I did so want to believe I could relax and accept an adequate novel, just for the sense of accomplishment in saying: I have a story available.

I'll keep to my month. I'll get Sooty  written. I've already spoken to an editor, too, to provide that so-necessary extra pair of eyes. I'll get Sooty  shaped up to where I can let it try its proverbial wings. I cannot say when, but I'm now hoping by mid-October. Still very fast, I know. But I'm trying to find that precarious balance between the sense of completion I need and the sense of pride I have to have in my work.

( Update:  I should clarify. I normally do not write so swiftly. For the other two novels-in-editing, one is going on for almost 2 years, the other, Adjacent Possibilities, for just over a year. Both are still being researched as well as edited and revised, and for both I sometimes wonder how one ever knows when something is finished. All I know is that neither of them is finished, nor will be for many months, perhaps years to come. )

Word counts are not totally abandoned, but I'm letting them slide until I get the outline done. Then I'll get the middle written, and have a completed first draft to announce.

Oops -- Revising Before Finishing

I haven't written in the last two days, but I have been poking about at the Sooty story, adding bits, taking out bits. And I've gotten quite a few notes of character development, plot points to clear up, and such. And pondering over a title for it. Sooty just won't do.

I've spent a day running errands, and another day on a wonderful hike to a new and different waterfall in the Coastal mountains. That walk will find its way into the women's fiction, Adjacent Possibilities, that I am currently not-editing, and hence grieving for. I have been making notes for it, too, as I write the Sooty novel. It is always in my mind, as is the third novel, the crossover speculative fiction. And all the other stories I can't wait to write.

"If we had world enough, and time..."

Part of the problem is that having been writing from the beginning forward as well as from the ending backward, I now need to meet in the middle. This was confusing me. So I opted to stop writing the middle until I got a detailed-note outline completed.

I dedicated myself to that today, but am barely a quarter of the way through it, as I keep stopping to adjust the story. And also stopping to do laundry, to answer the phone, to feed the cats, to take care of dinner, to move the sprinkler in the flower beds, and to walk to the frozen yoghurt shop after dark with my kids. Sundry things that take many little snippets of time and are distracting.

But then, that's also part of why I chose to work on the outline today. It's more forgiving of interruptions as there's no sweeping chain of thoughts to be broken off and perhaps forgotten.

This is why I growl when male writers thank their wives for taking care of daily life for them so they can write. Who, I ask again, takes care of married women writers?

Sooty Update

I only wrote 200 words today. I had revised the first few pages to take to my critique group, and then, working off their suggestions, revised the scene more this evening.

I've been working on the foreshadowing in this scene. Anna starts seeing things in weird new ways, but she doesn't know why -- after all, she hasn't met Sooty yet!

So, here's the current revision of the opening - previously seen here.

Sooty -- Opening Scene

 Anna huddled on her bed, clutching a pillow. They were at it again. Not quite fighting, but arguing. It seemed as if they were always arguing lately. Her tightly shut door couldn't block the sounds from the living room down the hall, voices that echoed in her as if she heard not through her ears but in her mind, and left her stomach churning acid sour. It didn’t take any brains to figure out her mom was unhappy, but why'd she have to make the rest of them unhappy, too?

       In her mind's eye, clear as clear, she saw her dad hunkered down in his big chair, his puff of pale blond hair sticking up over the back. He was holding a book, one finger carefully marking his place. The TV was on, though muted, and he was glancing furtively at the flickering images.

       His image was also flickering, as if she were seeing him through a camera lens while adjusting the focus. And when her mind twisted itself to a slightly new focus, she could see waves streaming out from the lamp beside the chair, and from the television – even from Dad himself. Waves of energy that overlapped in interference patterns like she'd seen in science class.

       Her vision spread. There was Mom, tall, straight. If Dad were flickering, Mom was a laser. Her energy, or whatever it was Anna was seeing, was so intense it was hard to look at her. Anna felt her mind pulling back, observing with something more like normal vision again.

       Despite her anxiety, Anna's curiosity was aroused. She'd never seen anything so clearly in her imagination before. And certainly never seen energy from people and lamps. Was it a stress induced hallucination? In unconscious habit, she filed the puzzling thought away for future consideration.

        Her mom's voice rose, words that sounded like needing to be herself or something. Why? She had a job she loved, a family she said she loved – what more could she want?

       Out of the rumbling that followed that proclamation, her mother snarled, “All you see is boobs. You never think about the person they're attached to.”

       A growling sound. Her father shouting – actually shouting, “I thought sex was what this is all about?”

       Anna's vision of the scene in the living room shattered. She didn't want to hear any more, either, and twisted around to drop face first onto her bed, squashing the pillow firmly over her ears. It did no good; she was still aware of her parents in her head, aware of the tense silence between them as the echoes of her father's shout jostled the corners of mind.

       And then her mom laughed, an awkward, gulping sort of laugh.

       That was a real sound. Intrigued, Anna jumped up and ran to press her ear against the crack between the door and its frame. She could hear their voices, talking now, not shouting, but she couldn't make out any more words. She brushed uncooperative straggles of her soft brown hair from her eyes and shuffled back to sit on her bed.

       She wasn't imagining things now, but she knew from experience that while Dad was listening to Mom, he was also hoping for distractions to save him from having to commit himself to a clear statement. That was how he disciplined her and her brother, Alan, too. Tried to discipline. He'd start by laying down the law, then sidle over to one side, then the other, and end by saying do what you think best. But do think, and do be careful, okay?

       The tight muscles in her face softened in a brief smile and stayed soft even when she thought about her mom. Mom did lay down the law, but, as she and Alan both had to admit, never unreasonably. She rarely issued her decrees, but when she did, what she said was absolute.

        Footsteps in the hall. Anna froze, a rabbit in headlights. The footfall stopped at her door. Someone knocked. Not someone. She knew who it was. Mom.

        She grabbed the pillow again and squeezed it hard If only she had something alive to cuddle. Her friend Jay had a cat, a big fluffy calico. Anna loved to pet it and hear its rumbling purr. Just looking at it made her feel soft and cozy. She could use that comfort right now.

       She'd asked her parents if she could get a cat. They'd said no.

        “Anna?” Just as she'd expected, her mother's voice.

        Oh boy. When Mom had been arguing with Dad, she often came in to talk at Anna. And usually it was the same speech. Don't waste your opportunities. Don't try to be someone you're not. And oh, by the way, you need to be more outgoing. Get more friends. Maybe try a new hairstyle. Not that her floppy straight brown hair would hold a style. Even the permanent her mom had coaxed her into a couple years ago had flopped. And she preferred glasses. Putting her contacts in took too long, even if Mom did say her dark eyes were pretty.

        Anna sighed. “What?”

        Her mom opened the door slowly, then peeked around to catch Anna's eyes. "Can I talk to you a second?"

      When Anna nodded, her mom stepped in, her hand gripping the edge of the door as she closed it almost shut. She stood that way, her lips pressed tightly together, her eyes on the floor, until with a visible breath she let her hand fall. She leaned against the door, and it closed with a sharp click. She seemed diamond hard, yet once again shimmering, as if Anna could see the aura of her life force. Her best friend Tai was always on about such things. Maybe Tai wasn't crazy.
       How strange, Anna thought. It's as if I've never seen her before. Or, she reflected, as if I'm seeing her through someone else's eyes. She studied her mom's face, long and thin – a well bred horse, Dad used to say as he tugged mom's long black ponytail affectionately. Thin – too thin, Anna now realized. Just being around Mom was exhausting. She never seemed to slow down, even when she was, in theory, relaxing. And she was always vibrating with energy that, for some reason, Anna could now see.

        “Anna… I'm sorry about the yelling. I've been trying to make a decision. I need to do something.”

        Anna didn't answer; she was waiting for the rest of the lecture. Instead, she lowered her head and made sharp little folds in the sheets.
        Her mom fidgeted around the room, opening and closing drawers, straightening the papers on the desk, twirling the cord of the blinds.

        “Anna, I do love you. And Alan. And I love your father. Please try to understand.” She let fall the cord, turned, and left the room, closing the door gently behind her.

        She was gone. There'd been no time for a reply, even if Anna had had one to offer.

        Anna held held up her hands. She noted, with almost clinical interest, that they were shaking. She let them fall, and turned her head to stare blindly at the closed door. Something was going to happen. She had no idea what, but she knew it wouldn't be good.

        The last few months had taught her how to cope with the turmoil she felt. Turn yourself into a robot, that's the trick. Finish homework, then get ready for bed, everything mechanical, without thought. It got things done, even if it couldn't make things better. Tonight, though, her mind wasn't cooperating as she'd like. She kept going back to that one exchange between her parent, about boobs and sex. Was that what the problem was? It wasn't something she wanted to think about.

        That night she dreamed, a strange dream, unlike any she'd had before. She dreamt she was a ghost, or something inhuman like that. Without shape or form, but not void. She dreamt she looked about her and saw the world as shimmers of energy, as of heat mirages above baking pavements in the summer. Everything shimmered, even the people she passed.

        She wasn't walking. She drifted like a puffball from a dandelion, caught in currents and eddies, not of air, but of energies emitted by people and objects.

Then she slid through a person, feeling in one bright flash all their thoughts, their dreams, their fears. She woke, choking on a scream that wouldn't come out.

        Dawn was barely lighting the window, but Anna didn't try to go back to sleep. She sat on the edge of her bed, pressing her forehead into her hands as if to force her mind to serenity. More hallucinations. I'm really messed up, she told herself. I need to get my act together.

        She pulled on her glasses, stood and stretched tall, then stumbled over to her desk. The internet would distract her, and help her to put her dream, and the visions of her parents that she'd imagined the night before, out of her mind.

Updated: I reread this, and felt it wasn't quite my writing. I keep running into this. I am not a florid, descriptive writer. I am told I have to put more description in, more tags that anchor dialogue to an action. That is not how I like to write. Yes, I need more, but rereading the above, there is too much. It is not me.
Writing is so bloody hard to learn, and it's even harder to find and develop your voice when others want something different from you.
I keep striving.

Writing in Reverse, and How On Earth Does One Self-Edit, Or Self-Evaluate?

I'm quite enjoying writing backwards. I ask myself, where do I want this character to be at the end of the story, and then I write. I refer to things that will need to be added or explained earlier in the story.

Then I ask, how did they get from the beginning to where they are now? What had to happen for the ending to happen as written? Add in the points I mentioned above, and a scene in front of the one I just wrote takes shape. Step by reverse step, I'm finding out where the story is coming from, rather than where it's going.

I may not get anything written tonight. Busy, busy, unfortunately. But I did jot down some ideas, and I got a section of the story worked up for my critique group.

I had another melt down last evening. I looked at my writing and thought, "This is crap. Total, incontrovertible crap."

Then I started writing, forgot about crappiness, and just enjoyed the story.

I keep wondering about my desire for external validation. There is a notable agent that is accepting the first 20 pages from ten local authors for her critique. Even if it weren't out of my budget, I wonder if I would do that. If she said it was no good, I wouldn't stop writing. If she said it was good, I still wouldn't stop. So, why seek opinions?

Obviously because I have no confidence in my own abilities. How does one acquire that objectiveness? All I read (and I read so very much) about self-editing seems inevitably to rely upon one's own discernment of what 'feels' right.

All I know is that when my editor has returned pages to me with lots of green crossings-out, I cannot understand why this was cut and not that, or why this emotional depiction was deemed unacceptable but this other was okay. I remain perplexed.

He tells me I should write more, and thus learn. Well, huh. I wonder how much writing it will take for me to feel confident in what I create?

Do all you other writers get hung up on this? Do you feel you know when you've gotten it right? Do you angst over understanding, or just enjoy the writing and accept the editing?

Gratuitous Sex and Violence, or Realism?

Young Adult, as a category, has become increasingly violent and sexual. There are books that are not, but these themes are prevalent. Often justified as 'realism', I always counter that realism also includes laughter, love, and happy times. Admittedly, those don't make such compelling reading.

Without getting into the research I've read on the cultural / social motivations for this trend, I find myself speculating on how much, if any, sex and violence I want to include in my current YA Experimental Novel.

Write what you feel. Yes, but there is a perverse streak in me that wants to turn this into another sort of experiment. Like the idea of writing a 70k novel (with editing and revising) in just over a month as a break from editing, I find I want to experiment stylistically as well.

It is not my nature to write sex and violence. It might be intriguing to see what happens if I make myself do so.

If the emotional catharsis that resulted from switching to first person in the other novel is anything to go by, the results of such an experiment could be mind-blowing.

Curiouser and curiouser....

I'll let you know what happens. But, I wonder how others feel: do you find yourself thinking about, or actually writing more sex and violence in YA than you would have a few years ago?

Sooty, Science, and Writing Backwards

I'm still struggling with the desire to get back to editing. Who knew it could be so seductive? But I need to keep to my goal, too.

This is not arbitrary. I need some sense of accomplishment, some goal I have attained. The editing -- who knows how long that will go on? After I work through all the notes I've made of things to add, clarify, or rewrite, I need to go over the work as a whole. Then it gets bundled off to my long-suffering editor. Then back to me for who knows how much more work.

Sooty, though, I am treating as an experiment. Yes, I want a good novel. Yes, I must be proud of it or I won't put it out. But I'm trying to learn necessary skills by doing them, not by reading about how to do them. Applying intellectually attained knowledge in the real world. That sounded pretentious enough, don't you think?

I'm doing something new tonight. When I took Adjacent Possibilities through the first round of editing, I pulled out all the scenes that had passed muster with The Editor, and then rewove the story around them. This got me thinking. There is no compelling need to write the story in sequence.

After all, this is how I solve mazes and other puzzles. Start at the end, then work backwards. For some reason that often works better for me.

So, I worked on the ending tonight. I was fascinated to find myself tying together threads that hadn't yet been spun, making connections that hadn't yet been clearly visualized.

I am also *forcing* myself, and it takes real will, to just write. The page is a mass of red squiggles, but the story is there. I will correct typos later. Right now, I want to see if I can get the words.

I have also started a bookmarks page, with links to articles on chemistry and on the many things we use everyday that came out of the space program. I wish schools would teach that fact: even space research, so often held up as an example of unnecessary spending and wasteful hubris -- our lives have been enriched in so many ways through products developed for the space program. Discoveries are often serendipitous. We might as well cut off our hands and feet as cut funding to research, or even require, as short-sighted politicians do, that research produce immediately usable results. Foolish, foolish blindness.

That was my soap box for today. And yes, there will be a hint of that in Sooty.  I cannot seem to help myself. I have to have intelligent characters who understand the value of science and research, of thinking, and of being reasonable. 

The Trouble With Taking Breaks

I am working on Sooty, the young adult speculative fiction that I will (!) have done by then end of the month.

But now, only a week or so into my break, I am longing to return to editing my philosophic, romantic, thoughtful but light-hearted novel, Adjacent Possibilities. It is calling to me. Like the wafting scent of the sweet peas I picked yesterday, like the fluffiness of a cat's tummy needing to be rubbed, like a path leading into the green darkness of a Cascadian forest, it entices.

The sirens were not so compelling.

Argh.

Sooty is Growing and Changing

I started writing yesterday, then realized I needed to get a more definite outline. I don't use a specific, point by point outline, but I do find it helps to have a sense of character relationships and developments, and plot points along the way to give me a sense of what I'm working towards.

When I start revising, I like to make a detailed outline of what's in each scene. This is really useful for that nagging feeling of 'didn't I say that already?'

So I set to work on the overall structure, and realized that the opening would work much better if I didn't introduce Sooty right away. Let the reader get a sense of Anna's life, and the domestic issue that is fouling things up for her, before Sooty comes in. At first he seems to be a deus ex machina, but is actually even more complications and dilemmas.

Therefore, much of yesterday's work was pulling out scenes and rearranging them, then writing them into a semblance of a coherent whole.

I wish I could do that often advised 'just get the first draft done, then worry about revision', but I don't seem to be able to swing it. If I see an egregious failing, I have to go back and try to poke it into cooperation.

Here is a bit from the beginning:

They were at it again. Not quite fighting, but arguing. Always now, always they were arguing.

      “You're just like all the men I work with. You don't see a person, you see mobile boobs. I've got a mind. And feelings. Just like you.”

      Anna could hear a sharp reply, but couldn't make out her father's words.

      Then her mom again, loud and clear. “I take that back. I'm a person. You're a narrow minded bigot.”

      Anna cowered in her bed. Not that she wasn’t used to these fights. They'd been happening more and more often. It didn’t take any brains to figure out her mom was unhappy, but why'd she have to make the rest of them unhappy, too?

      She squeezed her pillow hard, wishing she had something alive to cuddle. Her friend Jay had a cat, a big fluffy calico. Anna loved to pet it and hear its rumbling purr. Just looking at it made her feel soft and cozy. She could use that comfort right now.

     She'd asked her parents if she could get a cat. They'd said no.

      Her mom was talking again, something about needing to be herself or something. Why? She had a job she loved, a family she said she loved – what more could she want?

      Anna debated turning up the volume on her music, but instead decided to take a shower. The water drown everything, even her own tension. At least for a while. She rolled off the bed, and had one foot on the floor when someone knocked at her door.

      “Anna?” Her mother's voice.

      Oh boy. When her mom had been arguing with dad, she often came in to talk at Anna. And usually it was the same speech. Don't waste your opportunities. Don't try to be someone you're not. And oh, by the way, you need to be more outgoing. Get more friends. Maybe try a new hairstyle. Not that her floppy straight brown hair would hold a style. Even the permanent her mom had coaxed her into a couple years ago had flopped. And she preferred glasses. Putting her contacts in took too long.

      Her mom never seemed to run out of suggestions, though. Anna got the feeling her mother was trying to relive her own life through her. That felt better than admitting that her mom was disappointed in her.

      On top of everything else, her mother always hoped she’d be popular. Anna couldn't figure this out, since her mother wasn’t social. Her career at the university kept her busy. Too busy for her family, came the inevitable conclusion to that line of thought.

      Anna sighed. “What?”

      Her mom opened the door slowly, then peeked around to catch Anna's eyes. "Can I talk to you a second?"

      When Anna nodded, her mom stepped in, her hand gripping the edge of the door as she pushed it almost shut. She stood that way, her lips pressed tightly together, her eyes on the floor, until with a visible breath she let her hand fall. She leaned against the door, and it closed with a soft click
      Anna lowered her head and made sharp little folds in the sheets.

      “Anna… I'm sorry about the yelling. I've been trying to make a decision. I need to do something.”

      Anna didn't answer; she was waiting for the rest of the lecture.
      Her mom fidgeted around the room, opening and closing drawers, straightening the papers on the desk, twirling the cord of the blinds.

      “Anna, I do love you. And Alan. And I love your father. Please try to understand.”

      She was gone. There'd been no time for a reply, even if Anna had had one to offer.

      Anna held held up hands. With almost clinical interest, she noted that they were shaking. She let them fall, and turned her head to stare blindly at the closed door. Something was going to happen. She had no idea what, but she knew it wouldn't be good.

The New Novel: Working Title 'Sooty'

Sooty is a character in the novel. It is a non-earth entity that enters Anna's life at a time when her world is already in upheaval, and sends it into chaos. With humor, of course. I don't like to write depressing stories.

He requires unusual forms of nutrition, including elements that he transforms to suit his nature. One of Anna's challenges in the book is to find sources for these elements.

I was delighted to get these sites today: Visions: Rare and Precious and the Dynamic Periodic Table.  Thanks to GrrlScientist for the table via her wonderful series on the elements. I look forward to each week's element.

70k Words in 39 Days -- Or -- Yes, I've Gone Bonkers

Not just words, mind you, but a revised and edited novel. Something I can be proud of.

I realized the other day that for the last, oh, 8 or 9 months I've been doing revision. And editing. Two full length novels, very different, but still.

Now these tasks are both challenging and rewarding, but I like to write, too.

I also need a break so I can step back from the story that's been getting my main focus before I attempt yet another full-length edit and then revision.

And I want a feeling that, yes! I've finished something (as much as any writing can ever be said to be finished).

These points combined gave me the idea to write a young adult novel of about 70,000 words, written, edited, revised by the end of August. I will allow more revision and editing in September, but I want it to be as close to ready to go as I possibly can make it by midnight, 31 August.

I hope to have it up as an ebook by mid-September. I have to learn all that stuff anyways, so that adds to my motivation.

I will be posting a daily word count, and occasional bits from the story. I'll add links to articles that give me ideas, or references to topics discussed.

I will also ask questions, seek advice, and maybe even run a contest to name a character or set a scene.

Hmmm - now that would be interesting. Let someone tell me where to set a scene and then have to work it into the story in a credible way. Fascinating....

Without further ado, I announce that as of today, after four days of writing, I have 16,230 words down.

I was feeling confident because I will have a lot of free time in August. But today a one hour errand ended up taking over three hours, and that has shaken my certainty a tad. Well, that just means more time writing tonight, right?