Diana's Writing Blog

Okay, maybe I won’t manage a post every day, but I’ll sure try.

Anyway, in local news, I haven’t restocked my fridge yet and I didn’t feel like praying my brakes would hold as I tried to get to the only fast food place this side of the bridge. So, to make a long story short, I haven’t eaten yet today. Oddly enough, I’m not that hungry. I’ve been sitting in front of the computer all day and drinking soda and water, so maybe that has something to do with it.

In other news, my sister, who gets like this whole MONTH off for X-Mas break, is coming up tomorrow to hang out for the weekend. We are going to do such fun activities as grocery shopping, walking my dog, and putting together the 300 piece puzzle I got for X-Mas. And we may have a movie marathon if I can find anything she likes and/or hasn’t seen in my impressive collection.

Oh, and my daily progress isn’t where I’d like it to be, considering I plan to clean all night tonight:

Ugh. Sometimes it’s so hard to trudge on. Even if I know how it ends, it’s really hard to string all the different scenes together. Or maybe it’s because I know how it ends. Maybe it’s because it’s late and I want to watch the Doctor Who Christmas special before bed.

Oh, and exactly 14 days till the new Torchwood season starts. Well, in England, but not like that’s gonna stop me from watching it. Anyway…

Yeah, so, I promised myself and others *cough*kitty_bandit  *cough* that I would post in my journal more. So, here I go.

Let’s see, what to report. I’m back at work here in lovely Hancock. I love my job, mostly because it pays great (for this area anyway), has health insurance, and lets me stay close to home. But my true life’s goal is to be a novelist.

I’m not saying I want to be the next J. K. Rowling or even Christopher Paolini. It’d be nice to be rich, but I really just want to be read. That’s my dream: to have a novel published and have people read it and think, “Hey, that was pretty good.”

To that goal, New Year’s resolution #2 is to write at least 2,000 words a day. At that rate, I can do about 50,000 words as month. That’s a pretty decent sized novel (about 100 pages typed). I was inspired by my NaNo WriMo book and Janet Evanovich’s How I Write. The theme of the first is just keep writing and fix anything wrong in the editing phase. I read it a while ago and it had great points, but I wasn’t inspired to write until I read Evanovich’s tales of supporting her family by writing a romance novel every month.

So, my new writing method is to outline a story and plot characters as much as I can, but not stop to hammer out every detail. Then, I describe the novel in scenes, or just list the most interesting scenes (the ones I really want to write). That’s all day one. Then I begin writing those scenes and, eventually, string them together into a roughly novel shaped thing. By the end, the character’s names and back stories and personalities may have been completely rehashed about five times. But I touch all that up in the editing phase.

I started this mid December and I’m cranking along pretty good on my current novel. So, to combine my two New Year’s resolutions, I shall try to post every day and announce my writing progress. That way I have somewhere to check in (much like NaNo WriMo). So, here’s today’s: