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Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Tag Archives: Pulp Empires

Nano Reflections

06 Thursday Dec 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in NaNo

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#amwriting, anthology of short stories, Metahuman Press, nano project, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, Novella, Pirates and Swashbucklers, productivity, Pulp Empires, word counts, Writers' Block, writing


Last year I posted about NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month for those of you NaNoWirMo2who prefer their English unabbreviated. I talked about why I was not doing it and why that made me a heretic.

This year, in order to stay ahead of the curve and reveal my contrary nature, I opted to go ahead and do it. Because not doing it once and claiming you are doing so because it is cool not to is fine but there is no sense in repeating the pose for a second year. No sense in doing what people expect, always keep the audience guessing. 🙂

Actually, the main reason I opted to do it was to give myself a kick up the backside. Earlier in the year I had promised a publisher a complete anthology of short stories (well, one novella and some shorts) and had promised him delivery by a certain time. In the meantime, the deadline has whooshed past and I was still sat there with barely anything written and all of that painfully extracted over the course of several months. So, when November loomed I looked at my barely begun novella and decided that this would be my Nano project.

Of course, I still had the same problems as last year, which were my main reasons for not doing Nano. Work life balances getting all out of synch and all that. This time I even had a regular job to occupy me. I knew that 50K was unlikely to be a target I could aim for and still stay sane, married, healthy and employed. Instead, I opted for a lesser target. As things stood on my WIP I had just under 10K written already and I had predicted it to be about 30K when complete (various additional stories were planned to take the whole project to more than 50K, some of which had already been written and just needed tweaking). I therefore set myself two targets:

1) Write at least 20K words in order to get the total up to more than 30K

2) Complete the novella

By the end of NaNo I had written 20777 words which definitely achieved the first target and had put the novella to just under 30K words (close enough to be not worthwhile worrying about). However, I had not finished the novella…. the reason being that I realised that it is going to be a much longer story than I originally thought. I am almost at the end but there are at least another few thousand words to go and I am pondering additional scenes which may take it even higher than that.

So, I am counting my first NaNo experience as a win. I acheived one of my goals and only did not achieve the other because of changes in the goalposts. Not only that, but the process has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the project which had been mired in the doldrums for far too long. In the course of writing I created a new character who I enjoy writing (he was intended to be an incidental local colour character, present for maybe a scene or two, but I ended up taking him further than that) and thought of some new plot ideas which I hope work. Of course, I have also produced something that is grammatically messy, likely filled with examples of bad writing and worse plot cliches but at least I have produced something and there is nothing that cannot be fixed in the edit.

Would I do it again in the future? Maybe. I suppose it would depend on the circumstances – am I working full time? Do I have a project that is languishing? I do think it was a good motivation tool and so worth doing on that basis alone. Not sure I would ever get to the point where I would ‘win’ NaNo but I am confident that it will be useful nontheless.

Be gentle… it’s my first time…

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Publicity

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

#amwriting, Amazon, BBW Romance writers, books, Goodreads, mundania press, Pirates and Swashbucklers, productivity, Publication, Pulp Empires, reviews, writing


I was recently informed of a positive review of Transitions. Actually, I was informed of Transitions-AuthorCopythis review a few weeks ago, but am only just getting round to posting about it now. With an event to help organise (or at least provide moral support for), real world work to plan and my insane idea to do Nano this year (that’s a whole different post…) I was actually finding it hard to do much serious blogging last month. There was also the fact that the link I was sent to the review does not actually seem to go to a page that includes my review. I was not sure if this meant my review was yet to be published, was lost deep in an archive or was only visible during the third quarter of the full moon when the month has an F in it and is more than 28 days… So, I didn’t want to post anything about it until I got some form of confirmation.

But now November is over, the event was this weekend gone and Nano is also a thing of the past. I do still have real world work to do but my time is a little freer than it was. Ok, I still cannot find the actual review (if anyone can help, I’d appreciate it) but what the hell…

So, the lovely people over at Penumbra Press sometimes review books by other publishers and they decided to pick up mine (the full review is allegedly in their reviews section but I cannot find it). The fragment of the full review that was sent to me is fairly promising, however. It included:

“Throughout this story D. A. Lascelles artfully uses his skills with words to magically paint images in the reader’s head. Not only do places come into clear focus, but the seasons and atmosphere of the locations are also imbued with a descriptive clarity and realistic essence.

Written for paranormal romance fans of all ages, Transitions successfully marries modern day and roman Britain by interspersing the memories and history of roman officer Lucius Gaius with the ordinarily mundane lives of two university students…Transitions is a fair read that will keep you occupied, even if only for a day trip away.”

And the score was apparently ‘3 books’. I am assuming and hoping that this is out of 5 and not, for example, 500 🙂

This is, in fact, the first review I have ever had. For anything. By anyone who was not a friend or family member, anyway. So far both Transitions and Pirates and Swashbucklers have avoided reviews in places like Goodreads and Amazon though Pirates seems to have been marked as ‘to read’ by a lot of people. So, as a first go at the review wheel I am happy with this result. There will likely be bad ones out there too, not that I have found any yet, so it is good to start on a positive note. Plus, my ego is telling me that I should get that first paragraph printed on a T-shirt because I really like it. A lot.

Luckily, I rarely listen to my ego.

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