Daily Archives: November 1, 2011

Cold Fire Word Cloud & NaNoWriMo Day 1 (2011)

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For the first day of NaNoWriMo I offer up the Cold Fire Word Cloud. Click through to see the Cold Fire Wordle

Today included some discussion of the problem of too much research and/or worldbuilding bogging down stories. It’s received wisdom, and I think reasonably true, that YA calls for less world building on the page. My one concern about that is that by stripping out too much world building in an sffh YA setting, one unintended result is that the setting smooths more and more into a default generic American or Euro/Am.

Wordage:

1250 on Cold Steel (for the first day after a week off as I get back into the flow, that’s decent; I’m aiming for 2K/day).

850 on my new secondary project, which I’m doing in part to write something I have no expectations of, so I can get more relaxed into writing for the pure pleasure of working on a story for the delight of the process. This does NOT mean I don’t enjoy writing Cold Steel. It’s just that writing the first draft of Cold Steel has a lot more built in pressure because of expectations raised by the first two books.

NaNoWriMo. Plus signed copies of Spiritwalker books

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I’m going to participate on a parallel track in NaNoWriMo (more on that later) and also try to post something about writing every day in this blog, answering questions I haven’t gotten to yet, discussing world building, or just a short snippet of something I’ve been thinking about regarding the art and craft of writing.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here, now, or later, or on Twitter or Facebook or via email.

 

FYI: While at World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, I signed copies of both Cold Magic and Cold Fire as well as rare copies of a printed pamphlet version of Bonus Chapter 31.5 (there aren’t many of these). So if you want, contact Mysterious Galaxy Books, Borderlands Books, or Larry Smith Bookseller.