This update is a bit short, I’m sorry to say. I’ve had no energy at all today, and I’m putting this up so I can go get some sleep. I’ll manage a more ambitious update tomorrow!
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 28, Part 1
Writing Life | in General I’m pretty encouraged by how much of my daily word count I’m managing to maintain in the wake of Camp NaNoWriMo for June. Last December after November’s event I found that my word count had dropped pretty low, into the 50-200 words a day range. I’m doing a lot better than that this time around.
Hopefully with the August event coming up quickly, I’ll be able to maintain it all month and then reinforce it further. That ought to leave me in really good shape for September, with several months of high word counts behind me and two months “off” before NaNoWriMo 2012 begins.
Here’s another large chunk of chapter 27. I might have to write a little more to call it finished, but this is largely it. Tomorrow I go on to chapter 28!
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 27 Pt. 2
Writing, Writing Life, Writing Process | in General, News Two new chapters of The Ship of the Unforgotten are up tonight; links below. 25 is by far the shortest chapter I’ve written to date. 26 is of a more typical length. With 25 we return to Cobb’s part of the story, however briefly, and then 26 moves us back out to see how Dann and Rose are progressing.
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 25
The Ship of the Unforgotten, Chapter 26
In other news today I spent some time checking out Squarespace Version 6. It looks pretty promising and one day I might switch the sight over to that; right now I’m running Fiction Improbable on version 5. V6 has much better social integration, which I like a LOT, but it’s also highly template-based and you lose a lot of the ability to customize the templates that I love about V5. My ability to use 6 will probably depend on the availability of good templates, and right now the selection is thin, though the ones they have look fantastic.
Once I determined that I wouldn’t be making any sudden switches today, I did a bit more work on this version of the site. I’ve gone back and corrected tags and categories for all the posts in the Draft Stories section.
I’ve also converted the Draft Stories link into a menu. It’ll take you to one of two places for right now.
One is a page of links to all of the draft stories I’ve posted, which’ll make them MUCH easier to find. Sorry it’s been such a mess for so long!
The other is to the typical blog view of the draft stories, with one story per page, currently counting in at 14 total.
I do plan to come up with a similar solution for the Fiction Fragments section, but I now have the better part of a year’s worth of daily writing in there so fixing all of those tags and categories could be… fun. Wish me luck on that!
Writing Life | in General, News 
Yes, my 50,000 words are complete and my first successful Camp NaNoWriMo is behind me. My next is coming up soon though, I think I’m going to be crazy enough to do August as well.
Just because the challenge is over doesn’t mean the book is though. In the end, I had a LOT of writing to do really quickly. I wrote more than 11,000 words on the last day alone, and more than 6,000 the day before. In order to do all that writing that quickly, I worked on chunks of the book that I could spit out really fast, and wrote a lot of free-form brainstorms to keep the plot straight and make sure things made sense.
What I ended up with are lots of individual chapters that jump around crazily through time, which I need to put in their proper chronological order and then read over for flow and consistency, as well as write any gap-filler which may be needed (and it will be needed) to stitch the different pieces together as one.
Basically this means that for tonight, I’m a little bit brain dead and will not be posting a new chunk of the book. That can wait for tomorrow. For now, hooray! I’m done. Until August.
Two days left, and still thousands of words left to go.
I’m confident I can do it easily enough; I have the next two days completely free and clear to focus on it and just get it done, so I’m not worried about the raw word count at all. In order to write really quickly though, I’m writing out of chronological order, tackling sections of the story as they filter through my mind and feel ready to write.
Because of that, I’m going to hold off on posting them here until I’ve finished, or at least until I have a long continuous stretch of story that begins where I last left off.
Wish me luck!
Writing Life, Writing Process | in NaNoWriMo 
