My Writing Archives - Hillary DePiano

NaNoWriMo Advanced Word Count Calculator (charts, percentages, stats and more!)

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Oct 25, 2018 in Evergreen, My Writing, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) | 11 comments

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...

Turning what I wanted to write into what I needed to write

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Sep 27, 2018 in The Fourth Orange, The Green Bird, The Love of Three Oranges | 0 comments

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...

Q3 Summer 2018: Swim all day, write all night!

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Sep 13, 2018 in Goosed, On Writing: Craft and Commiseration, Pentamerone (Tale of Tales), The Fourth Orange, The Myrtle | 0 comments

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...

The Tale of Tales: the highly customizable, mix and match commedia style fairy tale play OF YOUR DREAMS

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Aug 31, 2018 in Announcements, News, Contests and Giveaways, Goosed, Pentamerone (Tale of Tales), The Fourth Orange, The Myrtle, The She Bear, Vardiello | 0 comments

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...

Camp NaNoWriMo July 2018 debrief

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Aug 1, 2018 in On Writing: Craft and Commiseration, Word Count Updates and Writing Goals | 0 comments

I went into Camp NaNoWriMo’s July session with low expectations. My only word count goal was to try to hit 50,000 words as that would make it my highest word count month for this laid back, low goal year and be good practice for NaNoWriMo proper. As for what I was going to write, my focus was to try to write a bunch of blog posts I’d been...

What I’m writing for Camp NaNoWriMo’s 2018 July Session

Posted by Hillary DePiano on Jun 30, 2018 in On Writing: Craft and Commiseration, Personally..., The Whine Seller & e-commerce, Word Count Updates and Writing Goals | 0 comments

You know what the problem is with becoming organized and efficient? I really miss being able to write about whatever random thing I felt like it. Sure, I wasn’t getting anything accomplished that way and I wasn’t moving towards my goals effectively in a big picture sense but, man, I felt free! If I wanted to write a random blog post about how...