Category: Writing

How I Wrote My Best NaNoWriMo Draft Yet

trevor

I have had a number of successes with National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo. I wrote a novel with only a drawing to guide me, learned some lessons, lost, and won. I’m getting practiced now, and have completed three novels in five years. My hands-down best performance came in April 2021, during Camp NaNoWriMo. I set a word count goal of 25 000 words – to double the length of the manuscript I started last November during NaNo 2020. Instead of 25 000 words, I wrote almost 50 000 and…

I’m a NaNoWriMo 2019 winner! What did I learn?

trevor
NaNoWriMo 2019 winner badge

Last year, I had a fairly stale, flat, uninspiring NaNoWriMo flop. And despite the fact that I think talking about failure in the context of creative endeavours is dumb and bad, falling so far short of my planned word count stung. But this year, I rocked it. I’m a NaNoWriMo 2019 winner, and it feels pretty good. I had an experience this year that I wasn’t really expecting. Other than a couple of days of weak output in the final week (thanks to a cold), I killed it. It was…

Unfamiliar Ground

trevor

Last night, while walking Leo around 10:00, I realized (having stumbled onto it without realizing) that what is normally a field of tall grass on the way home had been cut flat. Instead of comfortable darkness, orange high-intensity lights, even far away, revealed heretofore unseen topography that made this familiar home stretch seem completely alien. The options were to walk back the way we came, down by the river, and add another half-hour to our trip, or to press on. With little moonlight, and with the air cooling quickly, we continued.…

Re: Talent is Cheaper than Table Salt

trevor

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’ve been skeptical for a while about Kristin Lamb. I haven’t read her book, We Are Not Alone – The Writer’s Guide to Social Media. The growing obsession with social media “experts” turns my stomach, even when I recognize I could probably use some more of that expertise around the spillway. The #MyWANA community on Twitter, a sort of group-therapy session and navel-gazing exercise for writers, has both drawn me in and turned me off more than once with its promise of positive, passionate interactions and…

Driving Distracted

trevor

I’m sick of all this Tron posting. Work’s progressing but it’s time to share some other stuff. Earlier this year, I started experimenting with a form that’s kind of foreign to me. I’ve never dabbled in poetry–I’m a prose writer, a screenwriter, an artist. Not a poet. But there’s something lacking in prose sometimes. Abstract experiences are difficult to capture, and they require a much more loose structure, an ability to express the world and one’s thoughts in an abstracted way. Enter prose poetry. A perfect balance between the form…