Archive for 2010

I’m Pondering Word Counts

First of all: I reached the 45k mark for The Circled Green. So hooray for that. My goal is to reach 55k by the end of the month, which means I have to write about 500 words a day. As that’s what I have been writing for the past little bit, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

What I’m finding interesting about The Circled Green is that right now I can’t get a handle on its length. When I wrote my first draft of Blood Bound I used 80k as a guide to how close I was, and when I finished it 80k was the total of that draft.

The Circled Green isn’t like that.

At first I used 70k as the guideline – nice and in the middle.

As The Circled Green went on, and things started moving faster than I originally thought, I guessed it might come down to 60k. But now that other things are happening, and I know I need to go back and add some description and further scenes etc. it looks like it might be up to 80k, same as Blood Bound.

So I guess I’ll just have to keep writing and see how this one goes.

She’s A Vampire (Writer)

Last night I went to bed at about 11. About two and a half hours later I woke up with the burning desire to write something. Normally I would roll over and go to sleep but this time I was afraid that if I did do that I’d lose it. It was a new beginning to Blood Bound, and I like it. It takes the basic idea, the sentence of “I didn’t believe vampires were real until my brother came home from one of the undead” and expands on it. It’s a lot smoother, and it brings forward the voice and the setting much better than the original draft.

What I have also been up to, besides working on The Circled Green, is making playlists. Helps me organise my thoughts a lot, which is cool. Right now the character focus has been on Lauren, and here’s one of the songs.

It’s Vampire by Xandria.

So would you kiss the sun goodbye
And give your life to never die?

Thought You Might Like This

So, sometime in March I went to a few things for Writers and Readers week, which was a part of the New Zealand International Arts Festival. As well as the solo Neil Gaiman talk (which heaps of people attended), I went to Once Upon A Time, which was a talk about children’s/YA lit with Neil Gaiman and Margo Lanagan.

Fastfoward to today, and me checking my feed reader. In the latest links and plugs post by Bibliophile Stalker, I saw that there was a podcast recording of that talk put up by Radio New Zealand.

I was quite chuffed by that, and immediately went off to check out the rest of the podcast. As well as the Gaiman/Lanagan talk, there was also one about writing for YA, which I downloaded but have yet to listen to.

I love finding (and sharing) random things like this.

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