This past week, I read a book called No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the founder of National Novel Writing Month. I'm not going to get into the book here, as I'll devote a blog post to it sometime later this year, but I will say that it inspired me. I've attempted to write books without the benefit of an outline before, and it never ends well. Reading Mr. Baty's tips and encouragement, however, excited me to give it another go, in 30 days, no less! Yes, my own personal NaNoWriMo. I started writing a Young Adult horror story about a demonic Magic 8-Ball (that's all you get about it for now, though), and after two days am almost on pace. My goal each day is 1667 words, which will make 50,000 words in 30 days (50,010 words if your nasty). I wrote 1364 on Friday and 1885 yesterday, leaving me just 85 words shy of pace so far. But I'm not worried--the book also gave me a tip on writing time that I think will work wonders for word count once I get into it. I'll see if it works for me this week, and report back on it if it does.
I'm still shooting for 5000 words each week, which should be no problem these next few weeks with my NaNoWriMo experiment. Ended up with 5449 last week. Didn't quite make up for my slow first week, but, as I said, I'm not too worried about that. It'll all even out. I was happy about my social media experience this week--I was on Twitter quite a bit, tweeting and retweeting my writer buns off. I'm still giving thought to how I'm going to handle my author page on Facebook, but I think I've got it figured out. Last week I wrote a few health tips and a writing tip. I think I'll continue that a couple times or more a week. I looked through my Google Reader account each day, and even commented on some blog posts, which I need to do more of. I didn't use Google+ much, and I doubt that'll change. It simply feels redundant to Twitter and Facebook. I'll change my tune if necessary, but I'm not going to worry about it now. I did post my links to my blog posts, and I'll continue doing that.
This coming week will be a busy writing week with my personal NaNo. I also will have a new Speculative Fiction Writing Prompt on Monday, a blog post on Wednesday (a book review of Page After Page by Heather Sellers), and I'll do my best to have a Friday Flash on, you guessed it, Friday (though, honestly, I usually post them in the late evening on Thursday). That's it for now. I'll have another one of these looks back and forward next Sunday. I hope everyone has a productive writing week!
