WriMo Briefing

NaNoWriMo is past the mid-point, and I have this sorry novel in the making. As my word count goes up, the story gets FLATTER and FLATTER. The murdered girl is dumped on a sand spit beside New Melones, Memo is afflicted with a staph infection in a cave on the other end of the lake near Natural Bridges, and the main character is having meat loaf with Memo's grandmother. Where's the narrative arc, the suspense, the red herrings? I haven't a clue . . . I'm just writing toward 50,000.

There was another write-in at Starbucks last night with a newcomer, which means there were four of us, plus Miles who has this encyclopedic brain and is the artistic consultant of our newest member C. Ravenlocke, a fantasy writer and three-time NaNo winner. Miles popped out an answer to a question I had that turned out to be the only noteworthy thing I wrote last night. Well at least it had to do with death and was therefore remotely connected to the murdered girl on the spit of sand.

See how it's going?

Today is a writing day. The plan is a 6000 word day to get some words in the bank. Hopefully something goofy, unreal, disturbing, suspenseful, suspicious will fall out of my fingers instead of the meatloaf dinner I got hung up on last night.

Speaking of banks, the deal around here is that Cindy goes to the casino when I go to write-ins, and last night she hit a spade royal flush and won $1000. There is some WriMo math here for those of you who wish to calculate . . . I spent 2 hours writing 1670 words for zilch and Cindy spent 15 minutes and $20 to win a $1000. Is my math/writer friend Annie able to solve this word equation?

Write on ph