Gearing up for NaNoWriMo
I'm a little distracted right now and it won't go away till December. I'm going to be writing a novel, gearing up for Christmas, taking my purple belt test, and doing a bunch of work on the house. And doing a full time job too. And sleep, can't forget sleep.
The St Louis region of NaNoWriMo is getting together for a pre-planning afternoon to hammer out plots, meet new people, and get re-acquainted with the crazies we'll be spending November with:
Saturday 10th October
Crooked Tree Coffee Shop in St Charles (map)
2pm till whenever
I have a great start and middle for my plot, but I'm floundering with the ending, and still trying to pull out a decent theme. I have plenty of interesting characters to play with and a fantastic crisis (for me, not for them, it's going to stink to be them next month).
While NaNo people still have time to read, here are some good books and resources for the month ahead. There are thousands of books about writing fiction, these are my favourites:
- Christopher Vogler: The Writer's Journey
- Lajos Egri: The Art of Creative Writing
- Natalie Goldberg: Thunder and Lightening
- Carolyn Wheat: How to write killer fiction
- Stephen King: On Writing
- William Zinsser: On Writing Well
And a bunch of useful links:
- Kurt Vonnegut's Rules of Writing
- Strunk and White's Elements of Style
- PDF of Notes on Lajos Egri's "The Art of Creative Writing" (read this if you don't have the book)
- Marie Brennan: The value of the Bechdel Test (and what a Bechdel test is)
- Dramatic Structure
- Joseph Campbell's Hero with a thousand faces
Only 24 days to go...