3 minute podcast: Your Voice, Part 3: Personality

Hey there--I hope you've had a good week. Mine's been a tad nuts, with lots of varieties from almonds to macadamias. If people ever tell you a writer's life is smooth and creamy, tell them that's peanut butter, not books.

Anyway, I've recorded another podcast. This one's about putting personality into your words. It's only about 3 minutes.  Yes, I realize the posts have shrunk by a whole minute each week, but that doesn't mean they'll soon be down to zero. In fact, next week we'll probably be back to 4 minutes. Click here to listen!

Take care,

Victoria

4 minute Podcast--Writing YA: Your Voice, Part 2

Another week has gone zipping by. Whoosh! And here's the next podcast on writing YA. Four minutes this time, since I know ya don't have all day. It's about voice again. Voice is likely to be the topic over and over, because there's just so much to say about it. It's the leading feature of YA writing, after all.

 Click here to listen!

Wishing you the best, and talk to you again next week if not before.
Victoria

I'm starting a weekly five minute podcast

I've decided to create a series of podcasts as a means of persuading myself to be more consistent with this blog. They'll be all about writing and YOU. More specifically, writing YA and YOU. Approximately five minutes each.

Just click here to listen to the first one, called:
WRITING YA: YOUR VOICE, PART 1 

You can subscribe to my podcasts through Podbean, or have them sent to your RSS feeder.

This idea for creating podcasts came about because I realized something about blogging and me: When blogging, I just want to have fun. 

Much of the writing life involves pulling large quantities of hair out of my creative scalp. (This activity is otherwise known as writing a first draft.) Then styling what's left (second, third, etc. drafts. Then talking about writing. Helping other people with their writing and...

Well, anyway, there's a lot of WORK involved.

About blogging--true confessions here, I started feeling like I SHOULD BLOG. Which made it seem like work. And then I rebelled and quit blogging for months at a stretch. Yep, that's my blog profile in a psychological nutshell. Not proud of it, but writers can't be proud and do our jobs at the same time. (Otherwise, we'd never show our faces at our critique groups.)

I promise to do another podcast next week. And the week after that. Because they're fun! 

Victoria

NaNoWriMo Done

Those of you who don't follow me on Facebook must be in great suspense now, haha--since I've allowed two weeks to go by without any updates here on ye ole blog.

Well, I finished NaNo. Yep, all 50,000 words of it, a day ahead of schedule.

Really glad I did it. Breathing the NaNo atmosphere helped me take another big humongous giant step forward in learning how to write badly. Sounds funny, but really, writing badly is the first step to writing well.

To get any kind of story into any kind of shape, that story has to be started, middled, and ended. I wonder if I'm the first to write "middle" as a verb? If so, thank you, NaNo. That's exactly the atmosphere I'm talking about--an atmosphere in which anything goes. Well, anything in the form of words. Written words!

Although I did complete the 50,000 (+ a few hundred), I didn't complete the first draft of this NaNovel, which will need another 25,000+ words before the story has an ending. And I have to admit that I haven't read over what I've written, because I've had plenty of other things to laugh about this week.

The outcome? A lot of the most dreaded part of the dreadful first draft is overwith! So again I say, "Thank you, NaNo." I shall persevere and finish.

NaNo Days 9 - 20

NaNo Days 9 - 20. Snarl. Blarg. Meh. Glimmer.

Yes, although I haven't kept up with this NaNo blog, I HAVE kept up with the NaNo minimum of 1667 words a day. Which means I'm now at 33, 351. And very few of those words will make it into the finished novel. But what's a first draft for?

A first draft is for getting in touch with the story. Getting in touch with the story means coaxing the story to show its shy face. Coaxing the story to show its shy face means getting rid of all other writing pressures besides the pressure of showing up every day without fail. Showing up every day without fail means the story can trust me enough to reciprocate.

So that's what I'm doing.

I do have other writing pressures happening with various other projects in various stages of completion. But when it comes to this raw NaNo draft, my editor's mind is not invited whatsoever. The result is somewhat hilarious, a bit disconcerting, and rather ... well, maybe even fun at times.

And, by the way, if you stop over at http://vvyyllee.blogspot.com/ --she's offering a giveaway of SEIZE THE STORY. It's a really good book. :)

NaNo Day 7, 8

NaNo Day 7, 8

I skipped a day of updating but didn't skip the NaNo writing. My document has 11,672 words now. Pretty much all of those words will most likely get tossed out eventually, but that's okay. That's what happens to first drafts, especially those written with no attention to form. The most important thing is just getting the bones sketched in. After that, everything's easy by comparison.

I had some fun with the awful sentences by challenging a fellow NaNo writer to a duel of suckitude. We each picked out "favorite" worst sentence(s) from the day before, and entered them. An independent judge applied brilliantly irrational standards to declare me the victor.

My winning entry: No band was playing.

NaNo Day 6

Yes, I did the minimum NaNo words again yesterday, and finished well after midnight. Midnight isn't really so late, unless like me you wake up at 6:30 in the morning.

Is it easier to face 1667 words while tired because when I'm half asleep I just don't care anymore whether any one of those words will ever be usable? It certainly helps.

There's also the motivation of the daily deadline, a "now or never" mentality. "Now" meaning "still able to sit upright and move fingers on keys." "Never" meaning "If I get behind on word count, I'll give up."

Met with critique partners yesterday and brought 2 pages of raw NaNo spew. I watched their faces carefully. I know these people, and they can't lie to me. Not that they'd really try.

They--and their faces--didn't lie. Their words were nicer than their faces. They said things like "this new voice could work if..." Their faces said, "No way ever in a thousand universes will this new voice take off."

So, yeah, confirmation for me: OFTEN, writers try something out and it doesn't go anywhere.

But those experiments and detours aren't wasted time, either. All the writing you do improves all the writing you do. That's a quote. From me!

Onward. It's not very late, but next thing I'll do is the daily word grind.