Need laughter or motivation?

For those wrimos who need a laugh or a little bit of motivation, I encourage you to listen to the follow Writers on Writing interview with Chris Baty (author of No Plot? No Problem and founder of NaNoWriMo).

It's a double interview, with Baty following Literary agent Betsy Amster.

Cool site

I had some problems using this in IE, but Firefox worked without a glitch.

Visual Thesaurus.

How cool is that?

Blogging is important too

Spent some of today organizing my various snippets of writing, so now I have a chronological and cohesive piece of work to continue with. Does anyone else do this? Write in notebooks, home computer, laptop, Alphie, work computer (on lunch of course!) and then have bits and pieces everywhere? Takes more time than I allotted to put it all together and make it smoothe. But, I needed to do it. Guess I'm just a smoothe operator...

I've neglected my blog of late, tho I'm very fortunate to have many online friends who continue to support me through comments here and on my NaNo profile and via email and chat. Thank you all, it certainly helps! However, I've come to realize the importance of my blog by the readership base. We took in another (yes, another) abandoned kitty (10-week old Suki) and I discovered that he is an avid reader of my blog.

Click here to see.

Here's a close-up of Cairo with his new brother Suki:

Aren't they cute?

Soooooo behind

I am tempted to list excuses for why I'm behind, but there are no excuses. Writing is either a priority or it isn't.

However, all is not lost. According to my progress chart, if I write 2030 words per day, I can still do this.

In the end however, I'm not going to be too hard on myself. After all, every word written - whether it's 50,000 or not - is a word I didn't have before.

On that note, I've just viewed the progress of my Nano buddies and some of you guys are doing awesome! Way to go Wrimos!

How's everyone else doing? Feeling?

The two elements of writing

I was listening to an interview with Doug Lyle, author of Murder and Mayhem: A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic Questions for Mystery Writers, on Writers on Writing and he had some interesting advice for writers.

He said there are two elements to writing a novel: the art and the craft. The art is the storytelling and the craft is the structure of the writing. It's important to get the story told, then go back and worry about the structure. To me, that's what NaNo is all about, getting the story told - because I get so caught up in the structure element I never finish the art part.

How's everyone doing so far for word count? I'm a little behind, but I've dedicated a 4 1/2 hour train trip to Montreal tomorrow to writing.