Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

Well, I had steak, actually...but...

I won NaNo!

At just barely over 50k, the first (very) rough draft is complete and the next step begins. This is the first complete work that I've ever intended to edit and eventually publish. So, yes, this is very, very exciting for me. I also have plans for a sequel...but I want to edit and get the ball rolling on book 1 first.

Horsing Around

*cheers*

The novel has a title. Or, I should say that the series has a title, and the novel itself has a very, very random working title that will probably not end up being final. The series is called Horsing Around, and the working title for the novel is Point Chasing, which I probably won't keep because most non-riders don't understand the reference.

In other news, I found this awesome open source template! No more boring default stuff.

Novel Needs a Title.

I've made some changes to my novel plan as I plotted out. Instead of having 5 girls who attend a riding-type school, I am now setting it in a barn. The more research I did about those kinds of schools, the more I realized that they can rarely support the level of competition that some of my characters plan on doing. For example, many of them limit each student to one horse and one of my characters has five.

I also need a title...two titles, actually. This story seems to want to be a series, and so there will have to be a series title and then a title for the actual book.

NaNoWriMo, Again

I'm now ML (Municipal Liaison) for South Orange County. Planning the events has been a lot of fun, and the North County MLs are awesome people. It will be interesting trying to make things work for everyone, and I'm starting to realize that it *won't* work for everyone's schedule all the time. I'm having 3 write-ins a week, plus whatever North County is doing, and then there are joint events and random fun and stuff like that. I do want to have a random fun event at the south end of the county, though, because so far everything is Irvine and north.

NaNo Planning 1.0

NaNoWriMo approaches. I must prepare weopons for the fight. :-P

First off, I now have a computer without a broken hinge to take to write-ins! Yay! Everybody cheer!

I also created a notebook using OneNote to try and prevent some of the issues that made my novel awful last year and that have stalled Dead Ringer. While I'm not one for formal outlining, I do need a cheat sheet of sorts and a place to put my research and jot down concept ideas so I don't forget where in the heck I was going with this. With five major characters and a fictional school, that's going to help a lot.

So much for posting often...

Yeah, that didn't happen like I planned. Oh, and neither has working on Dead Ringer.

NaNoWriMo is coming up, and I'm planning on developing a plot idea I had a while back for a YA series about girls at a school with a riding program. It will be interesting to write, as I myself didn't ride as a junior (I started again 2 weeks before I turned 18) and there are very few schools like this in California. However, I will be developing a fictional school rather than trying to exactly reproduce a real one that I have not attended.

So, the next month will be a lot of character development, etc, and hopefully some work on Dead Ringer, though that is secondary as I have stalled a bit.

I really want to work on something publishable, and I feel so annoyed that I never get to write every great plot that comes to me...

25k

Just hit the 25,000 word mark with Dead Ringer. Yay! Confetti and joy!

Okay, fine, there's more to it than that. I really have to get a lot of things clarified, include more clues, red herrings, suspects, etc. I have finally figured out my main character's motivations and the reasons behind some of her actions. I still have more to figure out, but I'm finally feeling like I'm on the right track again with this project.

In other news, tomorrow completes my move. :)