Writing Well

Learning to Write by Writing

Non NaNo 2011, Wrapup

| December 3, 2011

Time to celebrate! November is over and so is my Non NaNo challenge. Time for a huge sigh of relief and a moment of thankfulness. My goals for November were: Finish the second draft of Saving Grace Finish the first draft of SG 2 Word Count Goal for the Month (Fiction Only): 75,000 words The [...]

Non NaNo 2011, Week Four

| November 28, 2011

This past week was the last full week of November. Only three writing days left of the month. The sun is sinking low in the west on this writing venture. The good news is that in spite of the holiday and one full day off to celebrate it, I still made good progress on SG2. [...]

Non NaNo 2011, Week Three

| November 21, 2011

I went on a writing frenzy this past week and it was wonderful! No, it didn’t have anything to do with all the candy corn, peanuts, and miniature candy bars I ate at a weekend church retreat. Well, maybe some of it was sugar induced. The week began with a 10G day. That’s 10,388 words [...]

Long Term Goals in a Short Term Society

| November 19, 2011

Why should you worry about long-term goals when you have short-term goals that are more urgent? For the same reason riders on the Olympic Cross Country or show jumping courses look one or two jumps ahead instead of at the jump right in front of them. And for the same reason water skiers look where [...]

Non NaNo 2011, Week Two

| November 14, 2011

Writers often have difficulty keeping the real world and the imaginary world separate. Countless are the stories about the hapless writer who, while sitting around the dinner table, wonders out loud what So-and-So should do in a given situation only to be greeted by blank stares because So-and-So is a character in her story and [...]

Non NaNo 2011, Week One

| November 5, 2011

Computers. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t live without ‘em. (Actually you can live without ‘em, but that’s another post.) Tuesday was the first day of my November challenge and it started out as a pretty good working day. I worked on Saving Grace – Second Draft and SG 2 and thought I made pretty good [...]

Non NaNo 2011

| November 2, 2011

How appropriate is this image to writing a novel? When you first start, you see only the Big Picture. The finished novel. It’s full of light and glory and beautiful words. The view is lofty (just like this view from Coronado Heights near Lindsborg, Kansas). Then you get started writing and before you know it, [...]

Smart Goal Setting

| January 3, 2011

2010 was an encouraging, enlightening, and informative year. Encouraging because I discovered just how much can be done in one short year. Enlightening because although I accomplished some major goals, other goals were frustratingly elusive. Goals that should have piggybacked on the goals achieved. Informative because seeing how one goal doesn’t necessarily lead to another [...]

2010 In Review

| January 1, 2011

I don’t do resolutions. It’s not that I think it’s a bad idea. I don’t. Resolutions are great things. I prefer setting goals to making resolutions. A fine line, you may say and you could be right. But resolutions have never worked for me. Goals often do. Do What Works! At the end of each [...]

December, Week Two Update

| December 11, 2010

If this week were presented as a line graph, it would look like a mountainous skyline! The peaks were Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with over 3,000 words on each day. The valleys were Sunday, Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday, with word counts in the triple digits only. The best of the valley days had a word [...]