Welcome to my yearly NaNoWriMo post. As the countdown to NaNoWriMo ticks down to zero, I want to give a shot out to this amazing program, without which I may never have become an author.

Who?: Thousands of people from all over the world.

What?: National Novel Writing Month

Where?: At coffee shops, writing events, libraries, or from the comfort of your own home.

When?: The entire month of November.

How?: By writing an average of 1,667 words per day for 30 days, at the end you will have 50,000 words, or in other words, a novel.

Why?: NaNoWriMo is a fantastic way to motivate yourself to actually sit down and write that novel you've been dreaming about!

National Novel Writing Month starts with heading to NaNoWriMo.org, signing up and committing to writing 50,000 words in the month of November (or your own unique writing goal). To help you achieve this amazing goal is an online word count tracker, numerous tips and tricks of the trade, a forum to post questions, informative and entertaining videos, and most importantly, links to your local NaNoWriMo group. These local NaNo groups host events and contests, some online and some in person, to give you even more personal support.

Only one of the five novels I've written was not written during NaNoWriMo! This year I'm poised and prepared (Hahaha, just kidding. Really, I'm crazy disorganized and scrambling as usual.) to write a detective thriller. So wish me luck, and I wish everyone who takes on the NaNoWriMo challenge this year the best of luck too!!!

Previous NaNoWriMo posts:
10...9...8...
The End is Nigh
It's That Time Again!

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just Keep Writing, Just Keep Writing; Writing, Writing, Writing...

Was murdered...typically. So, now that I work at a bookstore, I have come to a startling realization: a lot of best selling books are about the murder of women or girls. I never realized this disturbing trend before, but it was put into sharp relief for me when I read several recent new releases:

1. The Girl on the Train - about the murder of a woman
2. The Girls - roughly a coming of age story, but containing the murder of several people, including a woman and child (I'm not linking this one because I don't recommend it.)
3. The Woman in Cabin 10 - about the murder of a woman

Then I started to take a look at other titles:
- Woman of God (not about murder, thankfully)
- Razor Girl (not murder)
- Gone Girl (about a woman's disappearance)
- Pretty Girls (about a girl's disappearance)
- All the Missing Girls (about a woman's disappearance)
- The Lost Girls (about missing sisters)
- The Girl With all the Gifts (won't spoil this one, not exactly murder...)
- Shanghai Girls (human trafficking of women)
- The Hanging Girl (disappearance and death of a 17-year-old girl)
- The Good Girl (abduction of a woman)
- The Perfect Girl: A Novel (murder of a woman)
- Little Girls (death of a girl)
- Luckiest Girl Alive (woman with a secret)
- The Silent Girls (disappearance of multiple women)
- The Forgotten Girls (murder of multiple girls)

Many others, but I think you get the idea. Point being, violence against women and a preponderance of the word "girl." It just doesn't seem right and doesn't make me feel good. I feel like readers seem to be obsessed with the murder of women, and not just women, but girls. What does that say about our collective psyche as a culture? And I'm not even talking about the mystery section of the bookstore which likely has a high percentage of books (without the word girl in the title) that are about the murder of a woman. Also, this is just literature. This does not include CSI or Law and Order or any number of other television series that focus on the murder of women!

Truth is, I love CSI and I am completely guilty myself of being in the middle of writing a thriller about a serial killer who predominantly murders women. But why? I'm doing it because I think it will sell, but why in general are we so fixated on the murder of young women? Personally, I don't have an answer. If you do, I'd love to hear it.

P.S. I don't just read books on the murder of women. For a more comprehensive list of books I've read lately, please check out my previous post What Have You Read Lately?

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just Keep Writing, Just Keep Writing; Writing, Writing, Writing...

When the summer sun starts to slant in the sky and the breeze takes on a chill; this is when autumn begins. It is the briefest and most beautiful of seasons. The fall doesn't need flowers to brighten, for the very leaves explode with color. It is a time of abundance before the winter with fields full of gourds and trees full of apples. Sitting, watching the dappled sunlight dance through crimson leaves, sipping a cup of warm cider and breathing the chill air of fall is a perfection too sweet to last. We, lovers of the ephemeral fall, are those doomed to longing. There are poems lamenting the long winter and those wondering at the endless summer, and the spring that comes between these seasons is but a herald of warmth and life to come. But autumn is a wonder that fades quickly, leaving us with bare branches and cold, hard earth soon to be covered by blankets of snow. Every leaf that spirals to the ground is a reminder, like a grain of sand in an hourglass, of fall's demise, of cold, of death. Give me not daffodils or roses or a sculpture of ice, but a bouquet of autumn leaves frozen forever in their nameless fleeting colors. Capture for me that ephemeral fall, for that is where my heart will be. That is where I will wait for thee.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just Keep Writing, Just Keep Writing; Writing, Writing, Writing...

So as I head off to ConClave this weekend, I was reminded that I promised my blog readers some writing "gems" that I picked up at GenCon this year. Sorry for the delay, but here are ten shiny ones to start with:

1. Don't ever deviate from submission guidelines (i.e. Don't give a publisher an easy reason to reject you.).
2. When signing a contract, make sure a publisher is getting first serial rights only, not buying/owning your story.
3. When soliciting an agent, do not include glitter with your query letter or send it in a pizza box.
4. Do not query two agents from the same publishing house.
5. When networking, consider that a successful author's opinion is VERY IMPORTANT!
6. Contracts: Understand what you are signing!!!
7. Butt in chair.
8. Your character has to WANT SOMETHING!
9. 8 deadly words: "I don't care about any of these people."
10. There is no magic prescription for writing well, there are only tools and techniques in your toolbox. Try all the different tools in your box.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just Keep Writing, Just Keep Writing; Writing, Writing, Writing...

So once again my blog post is a day late, but I have a really good reason this time. Namely, I was busy finishing a short story until around 1:30 in the morning. Why was I up to 1:30am writing a short story on a Friday night? Several reasons: 1. Last night at midnight was the deadline for the last Writers of the Future Contest quarter for 2016 (thankfully calculated in PST, so we Midwesterners had a few more hours), 2. Some stories need to be finished all in one big push or they will never get finished, and 3. Occasionally as a writer you just have a desperate desire to finish something!

So I won't go over the Writers of the Future Contest too much here. I've already expressed my feelings about it on this blog. It's a writing contest that has 4 open submission periods every year, large cash prizes plus an opportunity for winners to attend an amazing writing seminar/workshop and awards show, and has no entry fee. It accepts most speculative fiction. I think it's awesome, some people don't for various reasons. I've submitted to it now 4...I'm sorry, 5 times (just verified), and came in as an honorable mention once (or 20% of the time, woohoo!). I often use it as a good jumping off point for short story submissions since they accept almost all year round (no waiting for submission periods) and are open to a wide range of stories (no searching for the perfect market). Also, this is a hopefully limited time offer since they do not accept stories from past winners or from professional writers, and, with luck (probably also hard work), I'll get to one of those points in the next few years.

I also mentioned some stories needing to be finished all at once. I find this to be particularly true for me and my short stories. I have little patience for lingering stories. I'm not the type to write half a story, take a month or two to consider it, then finish it up in another 3 months. When I have a stimulating idea for a short story (this story happened to be another one from a dream I recently had), I need to sit down and burn that idea out of my mind and onto the page as quickly as possible before the excitement and idea fades away. Now, I do have several shorts languishing in half-done land right now, but sadly, they may stay there forever. The story I submitted last...well, earlier this morning really, had sat half-finished for about a month, and I knew that this was my only chance to finish it. If I hadn't gotten it done last night, it never would have found an ending, so yeah, it was worth burning a little midnight oil.

Then we come to me just wanted to have finished something, gosh darnit! Like I said, lately I've had a run of half-finished short stories and I've also been going back to a novel that I'd finished, but now realize needs some more work. Right now I have very few finished, polished, unpublished works, and frankly that is not how I want to roll as an author. I want to be constantly churning and building up my backlog of finished unpublished works to have ready to send out when the right publisher comes along. So yeah, I was geeked to have one more completed story in the hopper. It was a small victory, but one I hadn't felt in a while.

So I hope you'll accept my excuse for not writing my blog yesterday. This is totally not an apology. ;)

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just Keep Writing, Just Keep Writing; Writing, Writing, Writing...