Whister pulled out Cliffy’s chair, and said, “This way, if you would, sir.”

As Cliffy jogged up to walk beside him, he asked, “Howzit all those lads know the wherefores? Did they get special schoolin’ on the way out?”

The metal man gestured at the boys around them, “Many of the young masters have been here for some time. The school runs all day and all night, throughout the year. New students join every day.”

Cliffy thought it sounded strange, but he’d never been to been to school before, so he just wrote it off as normal. Then a thought struck him, “How’s a body graduate, if none start at the same time?”

While we’re not quite halfway through the month, we are at the end of the second week of NaNoWriMo. By this time, we’ve identified three groups.

1. People who have way too much time on their hands. Devoted individuals who are already over 30k, and asking on Twitter what they should do with the rest of the month. Let’s not dwell on these bastards.
2. People who have put in the extra effort every day, but carefully meted it out so that they didn’t burn out. Now they are watching the little black line on the NaNo Stats page, making sure that they can keep up with the pace.

It’s November. Fall has finally taken hold and started making threats about the upcoming Winter. The election is over, Thanksgiving is yet to come. . . It’s also time for the NaNoWriMo whining to start.

Every year that I’ve been involved with the National Novel Writing Month, I’ve seen a proliferation of blog posts regarding it. Those posts fall into two categories:

1) Tips on how to put a huge, devoted effort into one month for a story you’ll probably never sell.
2) Snide remarks about how stupid it is to waste a month of your life on a story you can’t sell, and how you waste hours of editors time with those same stories. I’d like to speak to the writers, editors, and publishers who have advanced these ideas.

Today was a bad day, writing-wise. We’re on day two of NaNoWriMo, and I was spitting fire on day one. Over 2,000 words on the first day is a good way to start. I knew I’d burn out eventually, but I was feeling good.

Today I hit a slump. It’s not that I didn’t want to write. It’s just that I knew what was happening in the story, and this was going to be a boring bit. I mean, all stories are peaks and valleys. You have new, exciting things, full of plot twists and gunfights and dramatic heart-wrenching breakups. But then you have the lulls in between, where you set people up for the next big peak.

Marc Bailey and Heather Welliver are some great friends of ours that are going through a very rough time. They are good people who have been hurt by the current rampant unemployment. Now you know my family is having trouble after being attacked legally for so long, but if you have anything to spare, help this family keep healthcare for their sweet little child.

http://grailpack.chipin.com/support-the-grailpack

Help Protect a Pirate Ninja.

Click here to help!

In 2007, Allison Duncan’s husband drained all of the bank accounts and kicked her out of the house, telling her “You are not welcome in my home.” Less than a month later, his mistress moved in with him. This move left Allison homeless, penniless, and caring for a four-year-old child. Allison and her daughter were taken in by close friends in South Carolina until she could get on her feet.

Sometimes, when you’re writing the same story for a long time, you like to take a break and play with a short, meaningless story. While at lunch today, I wrote an extremely short story. Hope you like it.

Dana stretched her arms out as far as she could, cupping the air in her hands like sails. Her wrists turned ever so slightly, making her whole body spin as the air pushed against her.

Everybody says the first part is key. They say you have to hook the reader in your first sentence, your first paragraph, the first ten pages, the first chapter. . . So I want to share the first scene from my current work-in-progress with you. It’s a novel called “The Hidden Institute” (working title). Tell me what you think. Would this grab you? Would you keep reading? If not, why not?

Note: This excerpt has violence and some profanity.

—

Lord Wheylan Simmons was not in attendance when his valet was murdered. If one were to ask him whether he aught to have been there, he would smile kindly and change the subject.

Blast! With only a half-hour left to go, after doing noise removal and normalization, the audio is still too low quality to edit. This is probably due to the fact that I was trying a new configuration for the recording apparatus, which put the microphone slightly further from my head, and has apparently altered the audio enough to make it untenable.

As a professional, I know I have to scrap it and start over. I’ve had to do it in the past, but it’s never fun. Worse still today, because I’ve put so much work into getting the whole thing done in just four hours.

Just got to 9:47. All the audio is recorded now, and I’m ready to start editing. The plan was to get two hours of editing, starting at 9:00, so I’m pretty far behind now. Still, if I can get 30 minutes of audio edited in one hour-thirteen then I can celebrate this victory with an ice-cream sandwich and an episode of Doc Martin (cause I live in the fast lane).