Category Archives: Novel Track

Monday Musings, Volume 1

Current Facebook status: Quote of the night: Matt [watching football]: take the time out! Christopher: I don’t want a time out!
Currently Playing in the Background: Imagination Movers

So now I have three days of standardized[ish] posts ;).  Monday Musings is pretty much whatever occurs to me – News and Notes from the last week or whatever else comes to mind.

Novel Track update: I’m currently at 15402 for the month.  I hit 4000 plus a couple yesterday!  WOOHOO!

News and Notes:

ACFW Conference is in St. Louis next year! WOOHOO!  That increases significantly the odds that I’ll get to go!

Tomorrow, Julie Lessman’s first book A Passion Most Pure should be here!  Her second two are waiting at the library :).

Friday, I got WITSEC for research purposes.  I also got Erica Vetsch’s The Bartered Bride for fun and enjoyed it.  Look for the review sometime in the future.

Saturday, I got to go shopping and to Olive Garden with Penny.  WOOHOO!  Needed a girls’ night out – and we got free dessert because our dinner took forever to get to us :).

Okay – those were pretty random but I’ll plan better next time!

Flash Fiction Friday, Vol. 4

Current Facebook Status: kept Em home because her head and back of her neck hurt and she wanted to sleep longer. She’s doing much better though :). Thanks for the prayers! [explanation: Em fell on the sidewalk yesterday and bonked her head – trip to Urgent Care followed because she was acting weird – Dx: mild concussion]
Currently Playing in the Background: NCIS from this week
Current Novel Track word count [only NT Novel]: 449 words of drivel, but 449 words more than I had this morning

Yay!  Flash Fiction Friday!  Get to hang out with Jan a bit, procrastinate on Novel Track and still write a few words ;).  I’m thinking some variation on this may end up in my NaNo project…  Jan’s is on her blog.  Anyone else wanna take a gander at it?  Use the first sentence, set the timer for five minutes and… GO!

The young executive stood in front of the picture window biting her nails.

The forest spread below her like a blanket.  This wasn’t where she wanted to be.  She wanted to be anywhere but staring at the pristine snow of the mountain meadow across the valley from her.  She wanted to be back in Florida.  On the beach.  Well, maybe not on the beach.  It was the wrong time of year for that, even in Florida, but at least she would have had the option of pulling on a hoodie and going for a jog on the boardwalk.

Instead she was here.  In the mountains.  In a state.  One of the United States.

Maybe.

She wasn’t even sure about where she was.

The window shades had been pulled closed during the flight.  They’d stopped in at least four cities, maybe more because she thought she’d slept through one of them.

All because of what she’d seen and who her grandfather was.

Had been.

Wasn’t anymore.

But still.  The mob didn’t forget and she’d gone to surprise her grandfather – a former federal agent – only to find herself running from a hit.  She’d managed to get away, but she’d seen who killed her grandfather.

Who she was sure had killed her cousins when they arrived not long after she’d left.

Some surprise party it had been.

“When can I go home?” she whispered.

The agent in the room hadn’t heard her so he didn’t respond, but she hadn’t been talking to him anyway.

“I look to the hills from whence my help cometh.”  Quoting the Bible, via The Sound of Music.  She was going to lose it if this went on too long.

Novel Track and NaNoWriMo

Current Facebook Status: is up and at ’em.  Lots to do and so little time to do it.  Or something.  At least she’s not so loopy she’s going on and on about candy pumpkins again ;).
Currently playing in the background: Playhouse Disney

EEP!  National Novel Writing Month is only a month away!

Double EEP!  Novel Track starts tomorrow!

Novel Track is ACFW’s answer to NaNo – four months a year, you set your own goal of at least 10K words and when you meet your goal, you get a badge to put on your blog or website :).  My goal for October Novel Track [January, April and July are the other months] is 50K words which should finish my WIP [Work in Progress] – the sequel to Unbreak Her Heart.  Well, it’ll finish the rough draft – which will be very, very rough, I’m sure.

I think I’ve decided on my NaNo project as well!  I’m going to do something completely different – based in part on the Flash Fiction from Sept. 10.  I wrote a couple paragraphs for a friend and outlined the basics in another paragraph – she liked it as much as I did :).  I’m contemplating turning it into a Romantic Suspense book but that would mean research into things like Witness Protection ;).  I’ve already started doing some other research – turns out a friend’s husband is on the board of an organization in town that my play a role, etc.

So – can I write 100K in the next two months?

Triple EEP!

Okay – yes, I can.  I wrote nearly 65K last Nano and 100K the year before that [nothing I could whip into publishable shape but I did it!] so it’s possible.  I just need to make sure I write 2K a day.  I can do that.  Um, yep.  I can.  [Technically, 50K a month is about 1667 words a day, but 2K a day gives a buffer for those days it doesn’t happen at all.]

One problem I anticipate having is writing in a vacuum. I have no beta readers/critique partners at the moment so no one to send it off to.  Except maybe one.  Hmmm… Will have to ask her about that.  We’ll see how the writing in a near vacuum goes…  ACFW has a critique group designed, as I understand it, to help with critiques and then help people find each other and break off into smaller critique groups.  There’s an orientation of sorts the first 2 business days of the month [tomorrow and Monday] so there’s hope of finding someone soon :).

In order to get it all done, I need to make To Do Lists and stick to them!  That’s my problem – I’m great at making them, not so great at sticking to them.  Working on that too…

So I will be eeping for the next two months as I try to get this done.  I’ll be posting my word counts and excerpts here [favorite sentence of the day maybe?] so watch this space!

The writing frenzy is about to begin!