Saturday: day off in the City, seeing the Golden Gate, Tiburon and Union Square with good friends. Totally worth it.
Today: back to it, +800 words and counting.
-the Centaur
Posts tagged as “Nanowrimo”
Axually, it's Dakota's dumb mouth at issue here, and while I'd love to include an extract ... ssh, SPOLIERS! But the point being, the day after Thanksgiving, I'm back on track for National Novel Writing Month. And this includes an evening hanging out with my friends at the wonderful Nola restaurant I'm so fond of. No pictures of that (phone battery gave out) but I do have a followup picture from my solo excursion to Cocola Cafe in Santana Row, where I finished out today's Nano:
I've done Nano enough times that I probably could have skipped today and even tomorrow if I wanted, just to hang out with my friends who are in town (staying at another friend's house). But this "vacation" isn't really a vacation for me: it's a writecation. Writing really is like a second job now: if I want to be a writer, certain things have to get done. In this case, it's Nano, and sending off acceptances and rejections for DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME:
You'll note a little asymmetry there: my coeditor, who's done this before, is way ahead of me contacting people about their stories. And those are just the acceptances. Argh. And then I've got to respond to Trish's comments on my own story, which, while I was proud of it before, now looks like it will need a lot of work. Sigh. This is why I like working with editors, I tell myself, they make my stories better. Sob. At least Nano is on track:
Of course, the second half of the story is a complete salsa, and I don't know where it's going, but there's a building, and it's on fire, and it's a spectral fire, that only starts once a year, and there's William Blake's spirit guide riding a tiger, and oh yeah Cinnamon wears a Santa hat, then threatens to punch him in the gut if she meets him in a dark alley. So yeah, I'm having fun, even if I briefly hit a little plateau there while recuperating from all that turkey.
Now, more mountain to climb! Onward!
-the Centaur
Once again, I have successfully written NOTHING on Thanksgiving Day, spending it instead with friends!
Mission accomplished. What am I thankful for? My great friends that I've known for a quarter century.
The wonderful food we all prepared (mostly) by hand on a holiday that's not yet commercialized.
Preparing my first nearly perfect pound cake in a few years (more on that later). Not to mention living in a land where we can all not just eat, but have dessert! Most of all, being far enough ahead in Nano to just hang out and spend time with friends without worrying about keeping myself caught up.
As Fonzie would say, "Ayyy, little buddy."
I don't know how much more time I'll have this weekend to hang out with my friends; if it wasn't for Nano I'd be spending all my time sending out acceptances and rejections on DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME. But I do have to eat, so I'll be having at least one and possibly two more nice meals with my friends. And I hope several long phone calls with my wife (away on business).
More things to give thanks for. The gifts, they don't stop coming.
So, thanks, God, for everything.
-the Centaur
At last, back on track for National Novel Writer's Month. I like the graph: I like seeing how the week of a software release has taken a neat chunk out of my progress, and how a few days on vacation gets things back on track again. This reminds me to continue taking of the week of Thanksgiving every year if I want to get new novels done.
The title comes from a scene I've just written, in which Dakota Frost is baited into a battle with a wand-wielding priest. Soon Dakota realizes they were set up --- and figures out how to de-escalate:
The priest cried out, striking me with the back of his free hand.
I winced … then turned the other cheek.
The priest stared, drawing back his hand again. I reached up and put my thumbs through the straps of my backpack. Then I turned my head even further, exposing the cheek, eyes glaring at him sidelong in silent accusation. The priest frowned, then lowered his hand.
“Dakota Frost,” I said, extending mine. “Best magical tattooist in the Southeast.”
The priest stared at my hand dumbly, then realized he had a free one.
“Father Aidan Cosgrave, SJ.”
“A Jesuit,” I said. “Interesting to find a Jesuit wielding a wand.”
“God’s Marines,” Cosgrave said, “often find themselves wielding strange weapons.”
I'm over the halfway point of Nano now, with 6 or so free days on vacation to try to really get a head. Onward!
-the Centaur
Software launches. Anthology editing. I am now officially behind. Time to get back to Nano.
Fortunately I have the next nine days off, starting with tomorrow!
This is why I plan Nano carefully ahead ... this always happens, so you need to plan to have a buffer ... not just getting ahead early, but a place and time to catch up later for if and when you fall behind.
-the Centaur
Yesterday was nearly a wash - worn out after three long consecutive work days pushing software in preparation for a release, and then out late on date night with my wife - dinner at Aqui's (yum) and movie Tron 3 (AKA Wreck it Ralph, you're not fooling me, Disney). Totally. Worth. It., of course, but still ... less than 300 words done for the day.
But today? Up early to take my wife to the airport, had breakfast at Crepevine, and got almost triple that before even 9:30AM!
And now, I'm in for my second writing session, before even 10AM. This is what makes Nano work.
Excelsior!
-the Centaur
Pictured: Crepevine as seen from the upper window of Cafe Romanza, my wife at Aqui's, and progress.
UPDATE: Writing Session 2 done, I am now officially caught up for the day:
And, despite the last week's slippages, I'm still ahead overall for Nano:
Plus there are at least one and maybe two or three more writing sessions today.
Hyperion!
You have got to be kidding me.
I noticed a little extra space on my previous post at the top of a quote I pulled out of SPECTRAL IRON. I wanted to cut it out, so I went to Ecto, my blog client, and switched to its HTML mode. This is what I found embedded in my document as a result of the cut and paste - three hundred and thirty five lines of hidden goop, which looks like it came from Microsoft Word:
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.... hundreds of lines deleted ...
mso-style-parent:"";
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Charming! Feel like dieting much, Word? Axually, it looks like this may be part of a strategy to ensure formatted cut and paste works in Word and other programs, probably just interacting badly with Ecto.
S'ok, Word. We love you anyway, just the way you are.
-the Centaur
P.S. Pro tip: Option-Command-V pastes unformatted in Ecto.\
I don't see catfood on your todo list there, mister.
No, but I am back on track for National Novel Writing Month, even though today was consumed almost completely by a software release that just ... wouldn't ... die. I'm actually planning a postmortem on a tiny little patch that ended up becoming a complete new release of our software that exposed interactions everywhere from our unit test framework to software we're launching next year. That made me late for the monthly Writing Allies meeting - normally I chunk out a piece of time to write over dinner before I get there, even if we all are having too much fun talking about writing to actually write. But when I got home, even after a lot of cat wrangling, I did manage to sit down with the laptop (or, from time to time, follow cats around with the laptop):
Back on track for the day: 18179 words, or 16219 added. Still a day ahead. Woohoo! An excerpt:
Doug stared with interest at the footage from Ron and Sunny’s cameras, then at the pictures I’d taken of the graffiti with my cell phone. He asked if we had more, and I was embarrassed to admit that we’d hightailed it before fully finishing our location scouting.
“S’alright,” he said, reviewing the tape one more time. “Most interesting.”
“Well,” Sunny demanded. “What is it?”
“Definitely magic,” Doug said. “But I’m guessing you knew that.”
“Well—” Sunny began.
“C’mon,” Ron said. “There’s a demonstration of magic on the tape—”
“I was there,” Sunny reminded him. “And I do believe in magic. It’s just—”
“A projectia,” I said suddenly. “A caster’s will magically projected as a form.”
“Precisely,” Jinx said. “Like your tattoos, but free-floating. They can be as insubstantial and transparent as, well, ghosts, or as solid and opaque as physical objects. Your old boss, Christopher Valentine, used them to create his famous doppelganger illusion.”
Congratulations, Nano writer! Now back to work.
-the Centaur
Because we know we'll fall behind again.
What' s the cause? Launch crunch, exhaustion, and spending time with my wife before her upcoming trip.
And you know what, writing friends? All that's more important than Nano.
Totally. Worth. It.
I'm taking a whole week off at Thanksgiving just to write, so its Ohe. Kay. if I fall behind from time to time, as long as I don't let myself slip down the slope altogether.
According to my calculations, I'm fine. I could slip one whole day and still be fine.
Not that I plan to. Tonight is writing night!
-the Centaur
Alright! I set aside time for two long writing sessions today, so I finally got ahead, writing 3473 words today. If I can push it just a bit further, another 1600 words, I think I'll hit my target for tomorrow. If only I had a doorway to extra time ... oh wait: tonight, I do.
Set your clocks back, everyone. As for me, who knows if I'll get there, but it's back to climbing that hill:
-the Centaur
UPDATE: 1:40AM (after Daylight Savings Time) and 4292 words added today, totaling 9828 words. Night!
"Everyone's favorite skeptical witch is back for her fourth foray in SPECTRAL IRON!"
Sheesh. I do find it hard to write marketing copy. I just had to stop, right there.
SO ANYWAY, National Novel Writing Month, 2012. My one, two, three, four, five, six ... seventh, SEVENTH time writing 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. It's quite the challenge, but it's the second best thing I've ever done for my writing other than join the Write to the End group - more writing comes out of Nano than (almost) anything else.
How much writing, you ask? (Or maybe you don't, but hey, it's my blog post). Nano itself six times would be only three hundred thousand words, but it was the seed for seven hundred thousand words of text and four completed novels. The Nano's I've done so far were:
- DELIVERANCE - 2002 - 150K words - IN PROGRESS
Seven hundred years after the Fall of Humanity, a rag-tag crew of a human spacecraft at the Frontier of space encounters a distress call from a ship owned by the aliens that took the Earth - and encounters one of the humans they left behind, who doesn't seem to think Humanity fell after all ... even though she barely looks human.
Didn't finish this one, even though I eventually got 150,000 words into it. Hope to get back to it someday. My story "Stranded" in the anthology of the same name is set in the same universe, with a YA version of the same setup - the protagonist of "Stranded" is actually the granddaughter of one of the protagonists of DELIVERANCE. - FROST MOON - 2007 - 100K words - DONE
Dakota Frost, a magical tattoo artist who can bring her tattoos to life, is asked by the police to track a serial killer preying on the magically tattooed around the time of the full moon - and then she encounters a werewolf who wants a tattoo done before the full moon to control his impulses. Has she found the killer ... or the next victim?
Finished this one in 2009, published in 2010. - BLOOD ROCK - 2008 - 150K words - DONE
Magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost returns, now fighting a plague of killer graffiti that is attacking vampires, werewolves and humans alike. As Dakota struggles with this new plague, she finds that fighting it threatens her relationship with her friends, custody over her new daughter---and ultimately, her life.
Finished this one in 2010, published in 2011. - LIQUID FIRE - 2009 - 120K words - DONE
Magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost returns, now struggling to keep her head above water in a magical world which threatens to consume her. A chance meeting on a plane leads her to befriend the beautiful fireweaver Jewel Graceling - but as Jewel increasingly comes under attack, can even Dakota save her?
Finished this one in 2012, hope it to come out in 2013. - JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE - 2010 - 100K words - DONE
There's no better defender of the Liberated Territories of Victoriana than Jeremiah Willstone, and she'll tell you that herself! But when her rich and powerful uncle calls down a monster from another world and escapes with it in a time machine, is even the stoutest defender of Liberation up to the challenge?
Finished this one in 2012, hope it to come out in 2013. - HEX CODE - 2011 - 55K words - IN PROGRESS
Cinnamon Frost is a street cat turned domestic - where by cat, we mean weretiger, and by domestic, we mean adopted. But can someone who grew up running the streets really learn to settle down in class? Even if they have her favorite thing in the world, math, there's always English class - and if that's not enough, someone may be trying to kill her.
Still working on this one. Hope to finish it in 2013, have it come out in 2014.
Now it's on to SPECTRAL IRON, book 4 in the Dakota Frost series. Pictured above are some of the books I'm reading to "feed my head" for the plot of the book, which involves magical tattoos, piercing, the fae, ghosts, three kinds of zombies, television, and the appropriate relationship of science to skepticism. From the site, here's my blurb:
Dakota Frost is the best magical tattooist in the Southeast - but she's not in the South anymore. Her new role on the Magical Security Council has taken her to the underbelly of San Francisco, and she's got a camera crew dogging her every step as she's trying to map the magical Edgeworld. But when she runs foul of the fae, and is forced to do them a favor, even one of the world's most skilled skindancer may be in trouble.
Because if you don't know how to kill a ghost, how can you track down his murderer?
You need to write 1666 words a day to succeed at Nano, and so far, so good. Halfway through my day, and more than halfway through today's progress. I should easily catch up to where I should be (missed ~300 words yesterday because me and my wife decided to take a long walk and then crash after that, rather than me getting my late night writing run in).
But most of the day is ahead of me. Alright, enough procrastinating. Back to work!
-the Centaur
Finally finished my "From Nano to Novel" pep talk for the National Novel Writing Month site ... should be coming out later this month to the donors list. (What? You're not a Nanowrimo donor? You can fix that here: https://store.lettersandlight.org/donations).
But I've posted that to Facebook and to Google+. Posting it again here is, I think, a good idea to make sure people know what I'm up to, but in another way it's just procrastination ... I've got the gamma comments on "Stranded" to work on and this is not that.
Back to work!
-the Centaur
I am very interested in promoting creation. I think the world would be a better place if more people wrote, drew, painted, sculpted, danced, programmed, philosophized, or just came up with ideas. Not all ideas are great, and it's important to throw away the bad and keep the good - but the more ideas we can generate, the more we can test.
One of the biggest problems I see in unprofessional, unpublished or just unhappy creators is not finishing. It's very easy to start work on an idea - a painting, a novel, a sculpture, a program, a philosophy of life. But no matter how much you love what you do, there's always a point in creating a work where the act of creating transforms from play to work.
Whether you stall out because the work gets hard or because you get distracted by a new idea, it's important to realize the value of finishing. An unfinished idea can be scooped, or become stale, or disconnected from your inspiration. If you don't finish something, the work you did on it is wasted. More half finished ideas pile up. Your studio or notebook becomes a mess.
If you don't finish, you never learn to finish. You're learning to fail repeatedly. The act of finishing teaches you how to finish. You learn valuable skills you can apply to new works - or even to a new drafts. I know an author who was perpetually stalled out on a problematic story - until one day she made herself hit the end. Now it's on it's fourth draft and is really becoming something.
The tricky thing is you have got to put the cart before the horse: you've got to finish before you know whether it was worth finishing. This does not apply to experienced authors in a given genre, but if you're new to a genre, you have to finish something before you worry about whether you can sell it or even if it is any good.
You don't need for something to be perfect to finish it. I know too many amateurs who don't want to put out the effort to finish things because they don't know whether they can sell it. No. You've got a hundred bad programs in you, a thousand bad paintings, a million bad words, before you get to the good stuff. Suck it up, finish it, and move on.
Procrastination is a danger. This is the point in the article that I got distracted and wrote a quick email to a few other creators about ideas this (unfinished) article had inspired. Then I got back to it. Then I got distracted again doing the bullet list below and went back and injected this paragraph. The point is, it's OK to get distracted - just use that time wisely, then get back to it.
Finally, sometimes you just need help to finish the first time. The biggest thing is to find a tool which can help you over that hump when it stops being fun and starts being work - some challenge or group or idea that helps you get that much closer to done. To help people finish, I'm involved with or follow a variety of challenges and resources to help people finish:
- Write to the End: It's not a critique group; it's a writing group. We meet almost every Tuesday at a local coffee house and write for 20 minutes, read what we wrote, and repeat until they kick us out. We normally hit three sessions, so I usually get an hour of writing in every night - and hear a half dozen to a dozen other writers. Inspirational. Our web site contains articles on writing, including my new column The Centaur's Pen.
- National Novel Writing Month: A challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. This seems daunting, but Nanowrimo has a truly spectacular support group and social system which really helps people succeed at the challenge. Even if you don't "win" the first time, keep at it, you will succeed eventually!
- Script Frenzy: Write 100 pages of a script (play, screenplay, or comic script) in the month of April - another event sponsored by the creators of Nanowrimo. This is an event I haven't yet tried, but am planning to tackle this year to get back into screenwriting (as part of my 20-year plan to get into directing movies).
- 24 Hour Comics Day: It's a challenge to produce a 24 page comic in 24 hours, usually held the first weekend of October. I've tried this 3 times and succeeded once. It's taught me immense amounts about comic structure and general story structure and even improved my prose writing.
- Blitz Comics: Because I failed at 24 Hour Comics Day, me and my buddy Nathan Vargas decided to "fake it until we make it" and to put on a boot camp about how to succeed at 24 Hour Comics Day. We produced a Boot Camp tutorial, a 24 Hour Comics Day Survival Kit - and along the way taught ourselves how to succeed at 24 Hour Comics Day.
- Other Challenges: There are a couple of events out there to create graphic novels in a month - NaGraNoWriMo and NaCoWriMo - though both of these are 2010 and I don't know if either one is live. (If they're not active, maybe I'll start one). There's also a 30 Character Challenge for graphic artists to create 30 new characters in a month.
Finally, I want to finish with what inspired this post: the Cult of Done. I won't go too deeply into the Done Manifesto, but from my perspective it can be summed up in two ideas: posting an idea on the Internet counts as a ghost of done, and done is the engine of more. Get your stuff done, finish it, and if it's still half baked, post it to force yourself to move on to newer and better things.
The plane is landing. Time to get it done.
-the Centaur
Credits: The BlitzComics guy is penciled, inked and colored by me and post-processed by Nathan Vargas. Joshua Rothass did the Cult of Done poster and distributed it under a Creative Commons license. This blog post was uploaded by Ecto, which is doing well (other than an upload problem) and is probably going to get my money.
I'm part of a fantabulous writing group called Write to the End that meets at Mission City Coffee. This group, which started at Barnes and Noble at Steven's Creek before the economy and contracting book market convinced B&N to cut back on their community programs, has been the best thing for my writing productivity since ... well, ever. I'd even stopped doing National Novel Writing Month until I started attending the WTTE, but now I do Nano every year ... and go to the writing group almost every Tuesday. SO ... it's now time to give back.
I'll be doing a monthly column on the WTTE blog titled "The Centaur's Pen." In it, I will write about writing: about why to write, what to write, how to write, how to edit, how to get published --- and how to behave AFTER you get published. Now, I am not a great writer, but I'm trying very hard, I think about writing almost all the time, and I've spent a lot of time talking to other aspiring writers and learning about the art, craft and business of writing. So I hope my insights will be of use to you!
January's inaugural article is on "Learning from Publication:" how seeing your work in print can be an opportunity to improve your craft, even though you can no longer change it. An excerpt follows:
Recently I wrote a short story called “Steampunk Fairy Chick” for the UnCONventional anthology. Even though the story went through many revisions, lots of beta readers, two editors and a copyeditor, when I read through my author’s copy I found there were still things I wanted to change. Nothing major—just line edit stuff, a selection of different choices of sentence structure that I think would have made the story more readable. I can’t react to this the way I would with a draft; the story’s in print. And I don’t want to just throw these insights on the floor. Instead, I want to analyze the story and find general ideas I could have applied that would have improved the story before it hit the stands—ideas I could use in the future on new stories.To read more, click through to Write to the End and "Learning from Publication." If you want to read the story the article is talking about, click through to Amazon and buy the UnCONventional anthology (in print or ebook). Enjoy! -the Centaur
Well, the team at Nano are handing out winner's certificates now, so it's official: I've won Nano, with an official word count of 55,492 words. I'm still writing more of the story, but am switching to work on STRANDED tonight. I didn't get much done over Thanksgiving, but I did get this chunk written either Wednesday night or this afternoon (don't remember):
I shoves the monster back, between 5 and 6, dinosaur legs scrabbling, towards the loading dock shared with 7 and 8, hurling it backwards through the pedestrian rail which snaps with a tong as Mister Gargoyle falls on his fanny into a Dumpster of yesterday’s garbage. I’m about to leap down on it and rub his face in it, yes I am, when one of those clawed extra-thick raptor legs flies out and connects with my tiger chin. I yelp, shake it off, but when I’m back to snarlin, the monster’s runnin, holdin’ its shoulder, limpin’ off into the night. I stands on the loading dock and lets out my best bloodcurdlin’ roar. I mean, I knows he’s a gargoyle, but I hopes it gives him blood just so it can curdle. But the tiger doesn’t want to give chase, and neither does I. The two of us are of one mind: we gotta go save All Hours Todd.I've captured almost all of my notes on the story, so it's hopefully safe to shift gears. Though I have to admit it's hard to shake the momentum.
But I have deadlines ... in this case, Tuesday of next week, to get a draft of STRANDED to beta readers in time to get a final to my editors by January 31, 2012.
Onward!
-the Centaur 
Well, Instant Upload is weirdly busted so you get my smilin' mug instead of coffee. HEX CODE is now at 55,000 words:
I'm taking it a little easier now than I was before I hit 50,000 words ... taking more time to read and catch up on email, even taking time to review notes on STRANDED.
But I do want to dump the rest of my floating ideas for HEX CODE into the document while they're fresh, so I don't lose them. From tonight:
I saw this thing earlier, out of the corner of my eye. It easily kept up with me, lopin’ along, twice as fast now that I think about the angles, using its superior speed to keep good cover between it and my line of sight. My only hope is to sit tight and hope it leaves. Then the dragging noise I thought was a trashcan crackles right up behind me. I’m on quadruple frozen now, concentrating on not even moving my tail—harder than you might think if you’re not a cat and don’t got one. I gotta breathe now, but I’m taking it in slow-like, through the mouth, in and out, so that my gut hurts from clenching.Onward! -the Centaur
Once again I've completed National Novel Writing Month. This year, I finished 8 days early. Or, put another way, THIS is what happens if you turn off the Internet during Nano:
I've had a number of interruptions in Nano in the past and this year was no exception. I know I can finish 38,000 words in 10 days and I was initially trying to push to finish at twice the rate, or perhaps finish two books. Well, that didn't happen because of the Galaxy Nexus launch and you can see that in my progress here:
That chasm was the Galaxy Nexus launch (and a few other things tossed in there). But I made it through that, and ultimately succeeded today, sitting in a Starbucks at Santana Row here in San Jose (actually pictured is Michael's Gelato in Palo Alto because the pic from Santana Row hasn't uploaded).
Normally I survive Nano by taking the whole of Thanksgiving week off for a nine day writing intensive. But this time, I've finished early. I still have more to write on HEX CODE, of course, but I now have the luxury of leaning back and thinking through a few twists to the plot, with 50,000 words under my belt making the story solid. So ... I can actually take this vacation ... as a vacation.
So without further ado I present a snippet of the story that was written today ... raw Nano, unfiltered except for a little reformatting and removing some author's notes.
When I found out that Ben was human, or more accurately that elf meant human with special sauce, blabbermouth old me just had to go tell Mom. Then blabbermouth old me had to make up a story of how I found out, which involved a clever lie about school. Not so clever. That just called Mom’s attention to the fact that she now had two underage wards in need of schooling. Getting me into the Clairmont Academy was a pain in the ass, but now they all love us, so getting Ben in was as simple as selecting a school uniform. And boy, does he look hot in it. Hot hot hot. The points to his ears and the green in his skin and the red in the sweater, it’s like Christmas, and that poofy green helmet makes him look like a school uniform tree—when girls aren’t comin up to tousle it. They’re all lookin’ at him. I was sure he had a glamour, but now I’m thinkin it made him look scary. Now he just looks like a boy, a hot boy with funky green hair the girls can’t resist. A passing one does it again and darts off, and I feels for him! He winces, but he clearly likes it. “So, Cinnamon,” Surrey says, setting her tray down, “will you—oh, hello.” “Hello,” Ben says, and there would be a dotted line in the air between their elfin eyes. Surrey’s too frozen to sit down, so Ben stands up, takes her hand, and kisses it with a flourish. “Greetings from the halls of Appalachia, oh princess of Scandinavia.” “Oh, siddown,” I says, and Ben sits down with a plop. He glares at me, but I ignores him. “Ben, this is Surrey Eddington, one of my best friends. Surrey Eddington, this is Benjamin Damon.” My smile grows mean. “He’s my house elf.” “I swear, Cinnamon Frost,” Ben growls, “by the gleaming halls of elfland—” “By the power of Greyskull,” Megan says, sitting down next to the still-smitten Surrey. “Oh, hey, what are you?” she says, and Ben near jumps out of his seat—then plops back down again as Megan scratches her head and says, “Wait … I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”Next up I plan on ... chilling out, having a nice dinner, and joining my writing group for the evening to review my outstanding projects. First up is probably finishing the edit of STRANDED for my beta readers ... and then finishing Dakota Frost 3, LIQUID FIRE. Or perhaps I'll just chill out and clean up my library for Thanksgiving, and thank God I have it. Good luck in Nano, all! -the Centaur
HEX CODE has an epigraph, a quote by Cicero. I'm not sure whether it will stay in the final book, but it sums up the theme of the book for me perfectly:
Nature urges Man to wish that human society existed and to wish to enter it. —Marcus Tullius Cicero, first historically verified werewolf.The quote is my own tweak of a couple of different translations of this quote by Cicero - and of course Cicero wasn't really a werewolf. But I wanted to look up something about him, some damn thing about his tomb or whatever (not knowing at the time he'd been assassinated by the state and probably has no tomb) and made the stupid mistake of checking on Wikipedia. The sorry result, 30 minutes later, is what you see above. I'm turning off the Internet now, and I hope if you're doing Nano you do too. Because I think XKCD put the problem with Wikipedia best:
Wikipedia is a wonderful thing ... but browsing it isn't writing. Get back to work, nanoers!
Onward!
-the Centaur
So, now that the Galaxy Nexus site with its snazzy 3D viewer has launched, now that I'm on my long lonely but highly productive 9-day Thanksgiving vacation, now ... I'm back on track.
I hit 40,068 words in HEX CODE today, 38,524 added this month in Nano. So I've got 11,476 words left to go for HEX CODE. Since it's early in the day and I have two more writing sessions to go, I hope to actually finish that this weekend, or at least by Monday.
Then, unless I'm going gangbusters on HEX CODE, I plan to go back to STRANDED to send to my beta readers, and after that try to finish LIQUID FIRE. Doubt all of that will happen in November, but I want to go from juggling 4 novels in my head to having 4 novels with beta readers!
Oh, I almost forgot ... a snippet of HEX CODE:
The three will-o-the-wisps comes together, their colors merging as they swirls around each other into one big ball. The sphere brightens, shimmers, intensifies within its formless shield of mist—the light coming together with a ring and a dark spot, which whirls to face me. O.M.G. The three will-o-the-wisps have formed together into a giant eye. “Remember!” the Huntswoman cries. “You can hurt it with your sword, but not enough. It has a shield. You can defend yourself with your shield, but not enough. It has teeth. But it has one more thing, and that is the key. Find that, and you will find your victory.” “Oh, great,” I says, hefting my dumb little wooden plank blade. “Thanks. Even Yoda sent Luke after dreams before Vader.”Actually make that 40,092 words ... I wrote some more when I went to grab the excerpt. Enjoy. -the Centaur
I avoid talking about work on my blog as a matter of principle - even to the point of never directly referring to The Search Engine That Starts With A G by name, unless I'm talking about a product - but in this case I think I have to make an exception.
The Galaxy Nexus phone from Samsung and Google has launched, and the marketing site contains a 3D model of the phone developed by my team (pictured above).
Guys, great job. I'm proud to have worked on it with you.
I have a lot more I want to say about it, but at this point (2am) after an 14 hour day ironing out all the wrinkles in this launch I look about how I feel. Time to GO HOME and tackle this again tomorrow, make sure no fires are going ... and then, celebrate!
Oh, and please enjoy the phone and all its Androidy goodness!
-the Centaur
P.S. My opinions are my own and are not that of my employer, even if I do think my employer is awesome. And I don't speak for my employer, though I did run this by them first to make sure they were cool with it. Some restrictions may apply to your limitations. Do not taunt happy fun ball.