There isn’t much time left in National Novel Writing Month and you’ve found yourself behind on your quest for 50,000 words. You’ve got to write a whole lot of words in a very short time. How are you going to make up the deficit especially when you feel completely stuck?

There’s a lot of advice for last minute “cheats” but most of it is just designed to pad your count and isn’t actually helpful to your novel as a whole. For instance, in No Plot? No Problem! Chris Baty recommends cheats such as having your characters spout long quotations from books (which, of course, you’d just have to delete later) or always referring to your character by their very long, full name (Dr. Edward Robert Smith-Jones Esquire the third) which you’d only have to undo in editing. But there are a whole bunch of ways to get your word count up fast that will actually help your novel in the long run even if they are a little… unconventional. Continue Reading »

I have a lot of music. I used to listen to the radio just about 24/7 but now we live next to this big hill that prevents us from getting a radio signal (seriously, it’s really annoying). Working from home, alone, I really need to listen to music at all times in order to properly function. I download indie artists I’ve never heard of when they offer their albums for free. I download the free songs on Amazon. I ripped every CD in this house to MP3 (and we have a TON). I’m not picky. I just like music.

I do  listen to internet radio a lot as well. But I can only hear the same commercials on Pandora and Yahoo Radio in a row before I want to kill people. Also, there are many times during the day when I cannot spare the bandwidth for internet radio because I’m doing something  online that needs it all.

But, as I’m sure is a common issue for the iPod generation, I started to run into a problem with how to listen to all this. See, I’m one of those people that obsessively listens to their favorite song of the minute  over and over and over again and, while this makes me happy, it meant that I really didn’t listen to most of my song collection. I enjoy the random thrill of a song I used to love in high school popping into the playlist between my new favorites but true random shuffle wasn’t working for me because it was repeating songs and also giving me stuff like Christmas music that I don’t want to hear year round. I also felt like there were some songs I never ever heard.

It took me several years of tweaking, but I finally found a way to play my music to my satisfaction.  Continue Reading »

Just a quick post to direct you guys to this interview that I did for SocialJersey about NaNoWriMo: Meet NJ Writers & Finally Complete Your Masterpiece. As you may suspect, the focus specifically was on National Novel Writing Month events in NJ but I think almost everything we covered applies no matter what area you are in.

A small taste:

What are Write Ins generally like?

They can vary, but most are just an informal gathering of writers, some writing by hand in a notebook, most typing on a laptop. Many have their headphones on while they write so it’s just the quiet tapping of keys while everyone works on their novels.

On breaks, everyone chats about how their novel is going. When we have a venue where we won’t disturb anyone, we sometimes get a little rowdy – ringing bells to signal the end of word wars and other silliness, but mostly it’s just a casual gathering of writers writing and talking shop.

It’s a great way to meet other writers in your area! One fun little NaNoWriMo twist is that we encourage silly elements such as mascots and writing hats. The writing hat thing comes from Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problembook where he talks about putting on a Viking hat when he gets stuck in his writing. It’s just a little something to keep us all from going insane from too much writing.

You can read the rest here.