#NaNoWriWee books are up for reading

    There're here! Tokyo Pizza finally sees daylight!

    The entries that made it in under the 30-hour deadline in the Kernel Magazine's 30-hour NaNoWriWee (i.e. Weekend) competition are up for all to see here. Note there are lots of people accessing them at the moment and Google Docs can be a bit slow, so be patient.

    I highly recommend my own deathless 30-hour thaladomide lovechild of Chuck Palahniuk and the A-Team: Tokyo Pizza. Assuming I can get that link to work right. Maybe try here. I have decided it's satire, but you can read it as a thriller, of sorts.

    Voting is coming soon at Kernel Mag, more news as it occurs. For now, read and enjoy, note your favorites and remember to give them your love come vote time.

     Anyway - I wrote the thing in 30 hours on the miserable UK timeline, so my two writing days were midnight to 3pm on a Fri-Sat. It was interesting and exhausting. I do like the novella that came out of it. At 22K words it fell far short of a weekend novel, but I am anal retentive and wanted to do something of a length I could finish and give a one-pass typo and editing brush-up. I am proud of it, no matter that it has to wear a special helmet. It's my baby.

    I'm going to try to wade through the entries myself as time allows, and will edit this post and add notes on those that impressed me. Not so much as a guide for voting; just out of curiosity.

   For now, get out there and read!

Edit; I promised to list my favorites, but you know, as a competitor, I can't do it without feeling biased. So I won't. Go browse! there are at least five pieces in there that were quite fascinating.

It's not easy

The hardest part of writing is staying positive.

Not in your story. You can torture your characters, be negative and bitter and deliciously despairing – well, unless you’re in genre fiction and your editor likes fuzzy main characters – but in your daily writing life. It’s easy to fall prey to the niggling demons of self-doubt and depression when your fine prose – so much better than all that other junk out there! – doesn’t garner the interest you think it should.

Remind yourself: It’s a long haul, and those who make it to the end are those who keep trying.

It’s not always easy. In the wee hours, when you lie awake, head full of embryonic plots and characters mixed with stress and worry and self-loathing for having the insane egotism to think you could be a writer, it's hard. It’s hard when you’re standing in the checkout line at the grocery store and think “the teenage dropout who can’t make my change properly made more today than I did”. It’s hard.

But no one said anything good, or important, was easy.

You have to remember that what you’re doing has value. It is innately of value, in fact, by virtue of its nature. You are crystalizing thoughts, scenes and emotions that are utterly unique. You are adding to the sum total of human experience and knowledge.

You are writing.

That’s more important than you know.

Not dead, just writing

   I need to give the blog some love this weekend, the poor thing is sitting here, crying out for attention.
   I've just been very deep in the mental morass of editing one novella, and writing another novel while toying with a children's book that would make Edward Gorey flinch.
   Also February is grey and awful. Make it stop.

   In any case, should be an update here Monday on my NaNoWriWee novel "Tokyo Pizza" - which you may enjoy. It's ... different.