My 900th Post: What Should I Do Differently on This Blog?
WordPress tells me this is my 900th post on this blog. At an average of around 500 words/post, that’s 450,000 words, or about four novels. As I wrote in my last post, it takes me 16-20 hours a month to write two posts per week, and I could probably write about 25,000 on a novel […]
Will I Do NaNoWriMo Again?
Forgive me one more post on NaNoWriMo. Now that it’s over, I’ve been asking myself whether I should do it again some year. Although there are some NaNoWriMo groupies who do it every year, I don’t think I’m one of them. In fact, I’m not sure I will ever participate again. One reason I don’t […]
NaNoWriMo 2020, Week 5 — FINAL TALLY (almost)
I finished the draft of this new novel on Thanksgiving Day. Since then, I’ve been filling in some gaps, trying to get to at least the NaNoWriMo pace each day. Through Sunday, November 29, I wrote 93,200 words. The NaNoWriMo pace for that period is 48,343 words, and my personal pace of 2,000 words/day is […]
NaNoWriMo 2020, Week 4, and the Home Stretch
Through Sunday, November 22, my total word count is 77,400 words. The NaNoWriMo pace for that period is 36,674 words, and the pace I set for myself of 2,000 words/day would have put me at 44,000. Although my pace is slowing from the blistering 4,000 words/day of the first week, I am continuing to make […]
NaNoWriMo 2020: Well, I Did It. Now What?
From the start of the month through Sunday, November 15, I wrote over 57,000 words on my next novel. Whew! So, I satisfied the NaNoWriMo target of 50,000 words in a month. I actually hit 50,000 on Friday the 13th, so I guess it was a lucky day for me. The NaNoWriMo pace through November […]
NaNoWriMo 2020, Week 2 Is Underway
On Sunday, November 8, I hit 30,000 words! The NaNoWriMo pace for that period is 13,336 words, and my personal pace of 2,000 words/day is 16,000. So I have blown past my goals. I have never written 30,000 words in a month, let alone in eight days. And I’ve been amazed at how much fun […]
NaNoWriMo 2020, Off To a Great Start
I’ve mentioned NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) before—the national endeavor by authors around the world to write 50,000 words on their novels during the month of November. I’ve always had excuses for why I shouldn’t participate. The timing never seemed right. I’ve never written more than 20,000 words in a month. Plus, there’s Thanksgiving and […]
Steamboat Competition on the Willamette River in the 1860s
I’m trying to find business interests for one of my characters in my next Oregon historical novel. The novel is set in 1864, and Oregon didn’t yet have any railroads, other than a few small portages around falls on the rivers. But there was active steamboat competition along the Columbia and Willamette Rivers. The People’s […]
Random Photo: My Ninja & Pumpkin . . . A Simpler World Before the Pandemic
I hadn’t intended to write about a random photo today. I was looking for a specific photo to write about, but in my (unsuccessful) search for that snapshot, I found these Halloween pictures. Since this is the season for all things pumpkin, I will write about them. Thus, while these photos were a random find, […]
Balancing Humility With Confidence
I saw a post recently titled “The Timeless Writing Struggle: Ego vs. Humility” by Karen Debonis on the Writers in the Storm website that struck home for me. Ms. Debonis had written a memoir, and she described how she went from believing that her early draft would be a “runaway bestseller,” to realizing she had […]