Dark Night of the Soul - 15,445 words

A fanfic this morning, just for some fun.
Now deep in story mode, real work begun.
My protag's in trouble, in quite a scrape;
Dark night of the soul, from which no escape.

Wayward Web Search - 11,900 words

Was tied up in research most of today;
The Web is a master of time to slay.
Know I read something about this last week;
Now even Google will not to me speak.

Disconnected

No chance for status update yesterday
The Mad Scientist decided to play
With his router, left LAN in disarray
Then did the very same again today!

Kamikaze Sprint - 9098 words

Two thousand word sprint on "kamikaze"
Desperate ploy to induce writing spree
Doc Wicked, my hero in times o' distress
There's no other motive quite like duress.

Write or Die

Still fighting this cold, I worked in the rain,
Which did not entreat my health to regain.
Late in the day, I cannot tell a lie:
Not one word yet. It's time for "Write or Die".

Picking up speed - 7122 words

Story one is picking up speed, and my words are starting to flow,
but deep within the NaNo world the server is still running slow.
Ninety minutes to write my words today was all that I needed.
It may well take longer before my word count update is heeded!

Still sick - 5392 words

Still sick full on for four days now
This infection's growing old.
I'm tired and achy and struggling for words
And always feel the cold.

An earlier start - 3429 words

An earlier start today. I'm still sick
but more quick. Time to play.
My words done by one, I may
even get ahead to stay.

A fierce infection - 1739 words

A fierce throat infection, most the day in bed
Is no ideal start to NaNoWriMo
But minutes 'fore midnight, with eyes seeing red
My word count was met and away we go!

A quaternary quest for NaNo four

A quaternary quest for NaNo four:
No more the single tome from days of yore
Nay, a tetrad of shorts (or maybe more)
Equal fifty K words I aim to score.

NaNovelist Woes

My first YouTube video. (Please click through to YouTube to rate it and let me know what you think.)

The story of a girl, a dream, a challenge, a trauma, and light at the end of the tunnel. (A cautionary tale about a possible post-NaNo outcome.)

This video is my entry into a contest to win a spot in Holly Lisle's How to Revise Your Novel course. I'll be working on revising three manuscripts in the new year, so any tips I can pick up from this course should be timely indeed.

Video text written and performed by me. Fabulous graphics also by me (hand drawn with a mouse!) Music by Torley Wong (a human repository of watermelony goodness who has generously released much music and other fine creations under Creative Commons licenses.

At two minutes and thirty-six seconds (actually, 2:35 when I created it -- YouTube added a second somehow) this video was pretty much at the limit of what my poor old computer could process. Even at that, I had to greatly simplify the graphics from my initial concept. The original storyboard was more complex, but involved far too many key frames, causing my animation software to hang every time I attempted to export the file. Simplify, simplify, simplify -- and a conceptual re-write of the visuals to replace a whole whack of raster images with vector transformations -- and my software and I managed to cobble together the video you see here. Sort of a mash-up of visuals à la "Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings" with narration at the speed of The West Wing dialogue.

High Hopes for a Halcyon Hat Trick

The National Novel Writing Month web site is relaunched for 2009 (though I note it's overloaded as I write these words -- wouldn't be NaNo without a few good server crashes, would it?) and I'm reminded by Selestial's recent blog post that it's high time I updated Dragon Dreams with this year's NaNo plans. So here it is: the official "yep, we're doing this for a third time" post.

"Soaring sights of a sophomore scribe" is replaced with "High hopes for a Halcyon Hat Trick" (I'm feeling confident) and I've updated my NaNo profile with the working title of this year's effort.

When I first conceived of "Love on the Rocks" I thought it would be a < 2000 words short story. I worked on it for a couple of days last spring and quickly realized that, to tell the story I wanted, it would need to be much longer. Much, much longer. That's good news for a NaNo effort, but not so much for a story one is hoping to submit to a short story contest, so I shelved Love and got to work on a different story entirely.

I think that, during my realization that Love on the Rocks needs to be a novel-length work, I fleshed out a decent outline for the piece -- but as I've been working on completely different projects in the months since, it's a safe bet that I'll be revisiting those Love notes soon to see just what it is that I have. (I flew by the seat of my pants for my first NaNo and, while I enjoyed the experience, I'm not eager to do it that way again anytime soon.)

I've got a relatively clear schedule for November again this year, so am going for 100K words and a full novel draft. Looking forward to the ride.