Time to change the radio’s contents again. These are a few of the songs and instrumental pieces I’ve gathered to keep me inspired not only during November, but also while preparing the outline, working on the characters, etc.

The novel’s genre is sci-fi with a healthy dose of cyberpunk, so let’s not be too surprised at the choice of songs (even though not all of them will suit fast-paced scenes: I have a few quiet moments in it, too).

I stumbled upon this while browsing the Technorati tag about Writing, and although it’s nothing official, it can be a fun little challenge for those who would be interested by NaNoWriMo, but know they won’t have the time, especially by the end of November. The basic is simple: you have between October 31st and November 4th to write a 5,000 words short story (or less; the rules quite loose here). The interest? Pretty similar to NaNoWriMo’s: giving yourself the challenge and deadline to finally complete a story, only a short one.

Head to the Defective Yeti blog for the details about WriAShorStorWe.

Note: This is to be done in fun, of course.

Y Tags: short+stories | writing

Alright, I’m a blogging freak these days, I admit it.

The thing is, as I mentioned some time ago, I have this Wordpress.com account sitting in silence, and I couldn’t decide on what I’d do with it. After having mulled over this during the week-end, I came to the conclusion that I could maybe use it to post about NaNo.

Let’s not be mistaken, I’m not going to post there three times a day, as I want to go on updating regularly here, and during November as well (if I manage to stop playing Might and Magic VI in the evenings for the Nth time, I’ll get more time for this kind of things anyway! Damned be this game for being so addictive). Knowing the way my mind works, I simply foresee that I may find myself wanting to babble about it more than would be healthy for the readers here—it is something specific, after all, and I don’t want to turn this place in a NaNo-only blog in November. By then, I’ll have lots of other topics to post on the Y Logs, too.

Besides, I really just wanted to use my wordpress.com account. Really.

So… Yzabel @ Wordpress.com will thus be used as “my NaNo blog”.

Y Tags: blog | NaNoWriMo | wordpress | writing

The hunt season is open… I mean, signups are going to resume as of today, Saturday (yes, it is now “today” for me!) on their website. From the announcement there, they’re actually going to be open around 3 pm PST, which means I’ll already be in bed, but I can live with that and wait until my Sunday to create an account.

My resolutions regarding this are as follows:
— Not writing anything before November (which is part of the rules, so I’m not deciding anything weird here).
— Not deliberately working on an outline, subplots and others. I’ll write down whatever idea comes to mind, and they’ll very likely come by themselves in frequent enough waves for me to find myself with an outline by the end of the month, but I’m not going to worry my head over it. I want to start as fresh as possible, just to see if I can do it in a crazy way or not. The thing I’ll however do is to prepare my “magnae cartae”—a.k.a. two lists of what I like and dislike as a reader, so that I know mor eclearly what to focus on and what to avoid.
— Sticking to it. By November, I’ll very likely need a break from my two-continents world anyway, and this will be the perfect opportunity to take one. I’ll spend the month on that, then I’ll get back to my “big” novel.
— Deciding on a title before the real action starts. No kidding, I’m not exactly good at finding inspirational titles, and I need to seriously work on this flaw of mine.
— Music. Lots of music. Music, only music, but music. I’m slowly gathering what I’ll need for next month’s “inspirational playlist”, and I’m quite happy with it so far. It’ll be a joy to write with this in the background.
— Coffee and more coffee. If I don’t sleep for a month, it’s alright, I can catch up during the other 11.

This said, anyone who’s willing to join in the madness is welcome. We’ll drink to each other’s success in front of our monitors, while pushing the words out of our minds. I hope this exercise in writing differently is going to be wild and fun.

Y Tags: nanowrimo | writing

Or, better, getting rid of it for a time, because the beast has been plaguing me for quite some time now. I simply didn’t have a name to give to it yet.

As I was reading No Plot? No Problem!, I realized that often, I have a serious problem with my “inner editor”—this little voice that pushes me to take every text back again and again, even though it’s not finished, and polish it until it is “perfect”. Which in theory would be nice and useful, if only working this way didn’t mean taking my sweet, sweet time to finish something. Of course, it can never be perfect enough to my eyes, right?

Oddly enough, I never have any problems with it when it comes to technical writing. Technical writing flows fast. Technical writing knows by itself where it’s supposed to head to. However, fiction is a whole other matter, and while I’m supposed to write well in both “genres”, it’d be really great if I could for once leave the Editor behind, and fully focus on writing. I can always edit later on, when it’s finished. Starting to do it while I’m still writing is just like shooting my own foot, preventing me from going further.