This is a blog about writing from the words you can’t get out to the bits you polish and publish.
Welcome to the slush pile of my life…
Hair of the Dog Post-NaNoWriMo Writing Challenge
You know what the very best cure for a NaNoWriMo hangover is? Hair of the dog! Just keep on writing! But sometimes that’s not always so easy, especially if you’re feeling a bit burned out and missing all the motivation and fun of the big NaNoWriMo event. My Wrimos were lamenting this very thing and wishing they had just a little bit more of a push to help them get to the end of their novels so I decided, if it’s the structure of the challenge people like, instead of just saying “keep writing,” maybe we could all...
read moreThe end of NaNoWriMo and using the magic of the event before it runs out
My fellow Wrimos, November ends very soon. There are mere days left in NaNoWriMo. Some of you are still typing away, frantically trying to reach your writing goals and I am right there with you, trying to get as many words down between now and then to get there (at this exact moment, I am 21,957 away from my target so it’s going to be a busy week!). In the end, it doesn’t really matter how many words you write, what matters is that every word you get done between now and the end of this month is a triumph and one you did not have...
read moreIn your own way, in your own time (NaNoWriMo pep talk)
“They are making me feel bad,” my five-year old said, holding back tears. She glared across the playground where half a dozen kids were scrambling up the brand new climbing rope mountain like monkeys. “They’re making it look like it’s easy but it’s NOT easy because I can’t do it!” And I knew exactly how she felt. My first NaNoWriMo, I was struggling to stay on pace with the daily word count, having never written this much in my life before then, and there were people who had already breezed past...
read moreNaNoWriMo 2018 Bullet Journal Style Word Count Coloring Calendar
You ever see one of those really pretty bullet journal pages and wish you had something like that for tracking progress but have absolutely no artistic ability? I was having that very feeling when I decided to make this cool NaNoWriMo 2018 word count coloring calendar. It’s Frankenstein-ed from several pieces of clip art and a NaNoWriMo word count calendar I made myself and it’s ideal for making a pretty visual chart of your writing progress this month. Printed on square is the number of words you should have by the end of that...
read moreNaNoWriMo and writing when the world is on fire
What a month, huh? Trying to think about writing with current events being what they are feels exactly like this GIF. And, at times like this, it’s hard not to wonder what the point even is? When the world is a screaming vortex of bad and even tomorrow doesn’t feel like a guarantee, you start to wonder why are you doing something as frivolous as writing? On those days when it feels like everyone is ambivalent to your whole existence, how can you make yourself believe they would care about what you have to say? No one will ever...
read moreNaNoWriMo Advanced Word Count Calculator (charts, percentages, stats and more!)
I know that some of you out there are as obsessive as me when it comes to trying to figure out how far along you are in National Novel Writing Month so I decided to share my personal calculator. It’s simple but powerful. This calculator will work in Open Office, Microsoft Excel or Google Drive, depending on what you use. But it works best in Google Drive since that is what I set it up in (there are also some handy little charts in the Google version the other versions won’t get). It is very simple to use. All you do is type in...
read moreForget your novel! How to Prep Your LIFE For NaNoWriMo.
How do you prepare for a big undertaking like NaNoWriMo? You can just stumble into your novel-writing journey headfirst drunk buffalo style and hope it all works out. But you’ll have your best shot at success if you do a little preparation before the month begins. But I’m not talking about your novel itself, though your certainly welcome to prep that if your plotter heart desires. What I’m talking about is the kind of prep work even the most devout pantser can get on board with: preparing your life itself for the epic...
read moreTurning what I wanted to write into what I needed to write
The 2016 election threw us all for a loop that we’re still dealing with. Shortly after the election, I saw a tweet to the effect that you’ll probably be able to tell exactly where writers were in their manuscripts when the election happened and I thought this was interesting because this absolutely happened to me during the writing of The Fourth Orange. Though it’s one of the most recent Tale of Tales plays I released, The Fourth Orange was actually the very first play I started in this whole gigantic project. I didn’t...
read moreQ3 Summer 2018: Swim all day, write all night!
I’m kind of torn on tracking my writing goals quarterly. On one hand, grouping them by season makes sense and I like having only four updates to write and post instead of 12 like before. But the downside is that, even though I wrote myself notes, three months is too long for me to remember what the heck I was doing at the start of the quarter so I always end up with an incomplete picture which makes this less useful for me. Is it still useful for you? Feedback would be much appreciated as being transparent about my writing process for...
read moreThe Tale of Tales: the highly customizable, mix and match commedia style fairy tale play OF YOUR DREAMS
What is The Tale of Tales play? Around this time last year, I announced the premiere of a brand new play, The Tale of Tales. Considering I’m in the midst of a many year project of adapting Giambattista Basile’s Tale of Tales collection in a dozen different ways, people were confused as that could be the title of a lot of different things I’ve been working on. What exactly is this play? Well, I’m finally making it available to the public so now’s the best time to see for yourself! The Tale of Tales By Hillary...
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Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
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