NaNoEDMo!

Since I have a hefty-sized manuscript already, I have decided to participate in a self-imposed “NaNoEdMo” while all my writing friends do their frenzy of writing.  I worked it out this afternoon that if I edited three chapters a week, I could be finished with this round of edits by the end of the month.  I rebroke all the remaining chapters and came out with a total of 36 for the whole manuscript.

At the end of the day, I have finished editing two and a half chapters and managed to write in enough extra material for one more chapter in the manuscript, so now I have a total of 37, which means I need to edit one and a half chapters tomorrow instead of just half of one in order to keep to my goal.  Ugh.

What’s making me really nervous is the fact that my manuscript is now well over 90,000 words, and if I keep adding chapters here and there, it’s going to be up to 100,000 pretty quick, and this is supposed to be young adult.  So I’m hitting my threshold of length, and I’m scared that I’m going to have to go back through and cut like 100-400 words from each chapter.  Granted, having to cut that much will make each chapter that much stronger, and it’s probably a really good exercise to do anyway just to make it that much more awesome, but it means another round of edits before I can send it to the agent who asked for it.

And I refuse to settle for sending her something that’s good.  I’m not sending it until it’s knock-your-socks-off awesome.  Every word will demand that she read more.  The plot will blow her mind.  The characters will fly off the page and drag her into their reality.

I will get as damn close to these goals as I can before I send this thing off into the world of agents.

Get Yourself a Kindle (or something similar)

My husband bought me a kindle, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. You should get one. Or something similar.

Here’s why I love my kindle:

1. The screen does not hurt your eyes. It’s made using electronic paper, which means it uses an ink-like substance combined with electrodes or magnets or something and every time the screen changes, the ink blips kind of like clearing an etch-e-sketch (if you’re old enough to remember those things – do they make them anymore?)  In other words, it’s not like a computer screen, which requires light in order to work.  There’s also zero glare.
2. It has already paid for itself at least three times over. If you’re buying recent, popular titles, the prices are going to be about the same as what you would see in a bookstore, but you can find some of the really old classics for less than two dollars and sometimes for free.
3. You can get blogs and newspaper articles and magazine articles delivered daily directly to your kindle. Sometimes before they are available in print.  Sometimes for a fee.  I don’t use this, because I don’t read blogs or newspapers or magazines regularly.  But the capability is there!
4. You can email PDF files and TXT files (and other files, I think) to your kindle for $0.15 each. If it’s a TXT file, it functions pretty much the same as a regular ebook.  If it’s a PDF, it’s more like trying to look at a picture that happens to be of text instead of an image.  That’s the extent of my experimentation so far.
5. You can download music from your computer to listen to while you read. The kindle has speakers and a headphone jack.  You do have to convert your music to MP3 format.
6. It has a read-a-loud feature. True, it’s a robot voice, and nowhere near as dramatic as some audio books can be.  On the other hand, the robot voice beats some of the audio book readers I’ve heard in the past.
7. You can download audio-books. But you have to send them to your PC first, because the files are so huge.  I just use the robot voices.
8. You can organize and categorize your books however you want and search by title.
9. It comes with the New Oxford American English Dictionary, and if you scroll to the first letter of any word in any ebook, it will automatically look up that word in said dictionary and give you the definition at the bottom of the screen.
10. You can create bookmarks and notes anywhere in the text. This also works with TXT files you email to your kindle, but not for PDF files.
11. You can download kindle for PC for free and read everything there that you also have on your kindle. For free.  Anything you read or write on your kindle for PC program is immediately available on your kindle as well.  For free.
12. It has a simple web browser. I was going to get internet on my cell phone, but now I’m thinking I don’t need it, since I carry my kindle with me everywhere and it has a decent web browser that will do most of the things I would need it to do when I’m away from my laptop.  Like check my email or look something up on google or wikipedia.  For free.
13. You can read anything at any time. If you happen to be away from your personal library and you want to read a mystery, it’s there.  If you’d rather read science fiction, that’s also there.  If you want to read a story book, you have that too.  Your entire library is available at your fingertips at all times.  No matter where you are.
14. The battery lasts forever if you keep the wireless turned off when you’re not using it.
15. It has wireless 3G access. Everywhere.  For free.
16. It’s linked to your amazon.com account. So it uses your amazon.com billing information and you can opt to use one-click payment when you buy stuff.  For free.  Even when you’re “buying” free stuff.
17. You can get free samples of just about everything. And buy it later.  Or delete the free sample.
18. You can download sudoku and other puzzle books. Although playing them is tricky.  It’s almost not worth getting them.  But the capability is there!
19. You can delete anything from your kindle, to save space, or because you don’t want to read it anymore, but Amazon.com will keep it on file for you in the infinite space of the internet, so that if you ever change your mind, you can download it right back without having to pay for it a second time.  This does not apply to free samples.  Those disappear when you delete them from your kindle.
20. It has enough space to hold up to one-thousand, five-hundred books. That’s my favorite.  Let me type that again.  It has enough space to hold up to one-thousand, five-hundred books.  If I ever own one-thousand, five-hundred books, I might just die of happiness, if old age doesn’t get me first.  If you’re some kind of god and happen to own more than one-thousand, five-hundred books, you can archive them infinitely on that amazon.com magic internet space thing, and download them back to your kindle when you want to read them.  So, really, it’s more like there’s infinite space for an infinite amount of books…

Now, if you will excuse me, I have some reading to do. 

Writing Exercise 01

So I’ve started jump-starting my brain by doing this writing exercise where I go to a random word generator (http://watchout4snakes.com/CreativityTools/RandomWord/RandomWord.aspx) and use an online timer (http://www.online-stopwatch.com/) to give myself ten minutes to freewrite about the first random word I get without actually using that random word.  One of these exercises from the other day gave  me the word “Review” and this is what I wrote about it:

“Now take your papers home,” Mr. Vanderbilt announced, “and look them over.  Find the red marks I made and see of you can figure out how to fix them.”

Sarah glanced over the typed essay, counting the violent red scribbles tucked neatly into the double-spacing.  She took it home and examined every crimson stroke with care.

There were a few that had easy solutions like commas and new paragraphs, but there was one in particular that she didn’t know how to resolve.  This series of red marks consisted of a parentheses encircling a portion of a sentence with a single word written above:  expand.

Sarah tried to stretch the words out, but instead of oozing into more words, they broke into senseless piles of letters.  She tried stretching her brain around the words, but that only gave her a headache.  Finally, Sarah looked at the empty spaces between the words and stretched those out.  It took some time, but gradually, she began to find extra words stuck to the edges.  Sarah pried these off with her pen and placed them carefully into her sentences.

When she gave the paper back to Mr. Vanderbilt, she smiled and said, “I didn’t know it was possible to make something out of nothing, but now I’ve done it!”

Mr. Vanderbilt smiled too.