State of the Write

My writing goal is to finish a short story every other month, and come up with a cool idea for NaNoWriMo.

The current short story in progress is for our post-NaNo group, my second attempt at a first person perspective, and I have the beginning and end written, but not the middle.  The end will need to be re-done after the middle is finished to cut out all the extra explanations. Hubby turned my first short story for the group into a cool podcast complete with atmospheric music that we'll be playing at the next get together in mid June.  I have a first draft, with way more tell than show right now.  Happily, I'm the kind of writer who loves revision.

NaNo ideas (for me) are hard to come by, and difficult to plan out.  My "usual process" is to panic about it through summer, get a grain of an idea in late September and frantically work it up into a plot through October with huge help from Hubby.  I share the idea, he throws out ten plot twists, I incorporate a few, share it with him again and get another pile of plot points.  Rinse and repeat until you have enough story to last 50,000 words.  Might try my hand at a mystery for the 2009 NaNoWriMo.  I've been reading Carolyn Wheat's How to write killer fiction, which is an excellent book with a lot of good ideas on plot and structure.