Hey guys! Thought I’d give a little update on my Camp NaNoWriMo progress.
If you follow my blog, you’ll probably notice that I participate in almost every NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo, but usually I’m either too busy working on something else to finish it, or I end up writing a novella well under the 50,000 word goal.
This month was different. I reached my 50,000 word goal a few days ago, and I’m very happy with the work that has come out of it so far. It’s not finished yet, but I expect the final draft will be around 60,000 to 65,000 words. After that I’ll put it away for a while, then I’ll come back and edit it, which will likely make it end up around 58k to 60k. A little short for a science fiction epic, but again, I’m pretty proud of this story. I like it a lot.
I expect to finish the first draft within the next week or so.
The next session of Camp NaNoWriMo is in July. I’m not sure if I’ll participate in that one; I have a fantasy novel sitting at over 20,000 words and I should probably get back to that pretty soon. I have other ideas (I’m pretty much never short on that) but I’m not sure any of them are developed enough to begin working on.
For all my fellow campers out there, good luck! There’s still a week left, and writing something is better than writing nothing. Have fun!
Just a quick update here. For the April session of Camp NaNoWriMo, I’m making a second attempt at a novel I started years ago but wasn’t ready to write. It’s science fiction, which I haven’t written in a while, and it feels good to get back into the genre.
As always, some NaNo tips:
1. Have fun! Don’t take things too seriously. Missing your daily or even overall goal isn’t the end of the world, and writing something is better than writing nothing at all.
2. It may not matter what you write, just write. If you’re dead-set on reaching your goal but you have writer’s block, make a copy of your document and just go completely nuts. Write something off the wall that would never make it to your final draft. Chances are as long as you keep writing, the creative gears will keep turning, and you may just come up with a way past your block.
3. Put it away for a while. When I find myself stuck, I usually head for some menial task, like running on the treadmill or doing the dishes. Nine times out ten, a solution to whatever I’m stuck on pops into my head within a half hour.
4. And this one is for writing in general: Write down your ideas! I use the Notes app on my iPod Touch, and I write down everything. Every little thought, however incoherent. My recent novella Six and Seven started out this way. I was lying in bed, about to fall asleep, and one little thought popped into my head: Hell has seven chimneys. It took almost a year before I began fleshing that out into a story, but the result is one of my favorite works. And you never know when some little note or idea or sentence will be just what you need to get yourself moving again.
I’m excited to announce the release of my novella Six and Seven. I first posted about this project right here on my blog, and since then it’s been finished, edited, illustrated, and now published.
Call it Hell, call it the Underworld, call it whatever you like, a lost soul known only as Six calls it “In” and he’s stuck here. The souls of In spend their time feeding or fanning flames, watched over by strange creatures called Bellows, and staring through the constant snow of ash at seven distant chimneys visible at all times but eternally unreachable.
Then another soul called Seven gives Six some interesting news: You can get Out by climbing up through one of the chimneys, and Seven figured out how to get to them. Six and Seven set off across the ashy plains toward a chimney, and they quickly learn the rules. The only way to reach the chimney is to progress toward it metaphysically, by finding objects from their lives before In. But each object is accompanied by a painful death, which is followed by a memory from Six’s life, and with each glimpse of what he left behind, Six begins to wonder if he truly wants Out at all.
Six and Seven is a novella and a short story that serves as a direct sequel to it. It features illustrations by me.
The e-book is already available at Smashwords for $2.99, and should be available for Kindle and at most other e-book retailers very soon.
I’m working on a fantasy novel I started last summer. It’s progressing very well, I’m over 20,000 words in.
I’ve also started working on a new project based on an old idea. I won’t say much about it yet because I’m not too certain of it, but if I finish this it will probably be very soon and I’ll probably release it for free.
Speaking of writing, I’ve been taking part in Word Wars on the Shut Up and Write subreddit. It’s a lot of fun. More info here: http://www.reddit.com/r/shutupandwrite/
Editing
I finished editing Six and Seven a while ago. I’m working on finding a home for it.
Reading
I’ve been reading Planet of Exile by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’m not normally a fan of poetic prose, but in this book it works very well. It’s written gorgeously.
I’ve also been reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I’m very early in, and so far it seems like things I normally wouldn’t care about. I figure it’s been roughly seven pages (I’m reading an e-book so I’m not sure) of information I’m indifferent to involving one character, now and then sprinkled with very exciting and interesting things about another character. Somehow, all of it has me hooked, even the parts that I would normally find useless or even stop reading because of. Gaiman has a very strong voice, I think that’s holding it together and making even the boring parts worth reading.
For more info on my reading activities, feel free to follow me on Goodreads.
I haven’t posted in a while but I haven’t stopped working, I promise. I was sick for a week or two, and now I’m feeling a lot better. Work was slow, but it never stops.
I started editing Six and Seven, that novella I posted about a while back. It’s going very smoothly, and I really like this story.
Editing! (I’m better at doing that than drawing, if you couldn’t tell).
I’ve also been writing. I’m nearly 20,000 words into my latest project, and that’s going pretty smoothly as well.
I’m still working on finding an agent for one of my manuscripts, and things are looking all right on the self-publishing side of things, too.
I have a few ideas for more blog posts regarding advice, tips, what I’ve learned in general, that sort of thing.
You may have noticed I posted pretty much nothing regarding NaNoWriMo last month. Sorry. I participated up to a point, but I decided I’d rather focus on things that were already on my plate.
Hey guys, I put a new page up on my blog. It’s a sub-page of the Published Works section, or you can click this link.
The page contains the entirety of my short story “The River” from the collection After the Bite. If you like what you see, there’s a longer preview featuring a few more stories on the book’s Smashwords page.
If zombies aren’t your thing, feel free to share the page with anyone you think might be interested. I’d be eternally grateful to you.
After the Bite by David Lovato and Seth Thomas. Cover art by Laura Soret.
This is that big announcement I’ve been talking about. My friend Seth Thomas and I have written a collection of short stories about zombies, and we’re self-publishing it. It’s called After the Bite.
We’ve been working on this for a while. We actually wrote a book, and these are stories set in the same universe, but they stand on their own.
You can buy After the Bite on Smashwords for $4.99. It should be available through other retailers (like Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Apple iBooks and more) in the coming weeks. We’re also looking at a print edition.
If you’re at all interested in zombie fiction, it’d mean a lot to us if you picked up a copy of our book. The first few stories are available as a free preview on Smashwords, and I’ve decided to write up a brief summary of each of the stories so you’re not going in blind. If zombies aren’t your thing (and even if they are), you’ll forever be awesome to me if you pass this link around to your friends and family.
Thanks again to everyone who has followed Seth and I, our blogs, our facebook pages, our lives in general. You mean the world to us.
If you decide to get a copy, it’d also mean a lot if you left us a review on Smashwords or Goodreads or wherever. Every little bit helps us out, and we appreciate it so much.
We love you guys.
Here are the summaries:
1. The River – Jack and Henry are brothers and best friends, but the world threatens to pull them apart. The zombies aren’t helping, either.
2. On the Road – Larry embarks on a survival road trip across a post-apocalyptic America.
3. Holy War – A Jewish man and his Muslim neighbor meet daily in a battle of words.
4. The Living Dead – A brief glimpse of what it means to one man to be alive.
5. On 68th and Woodland Drive – A short poem about the zombie apocalypse.
6. Tragedy in Belford – A successful writer pens the moments leading up to the zombie apocalypse.
7. Sanctuary – A man named Garrett is looking for safety, like a lot of people. Finding none, he decides to make it himself.
8. Death’s Robe – A portrait of the zombie apocalypse.
9. Grampa’s War Story – A group of soldiers on a secret mission in the Middle East must battle enemy combatants and zombies alike.
10. Concrete Nightmare – It’s just another day on the job, until people start eating each other.
11. Dead and Gone – A poem written on a blood-stained scrap of paper.
12. Acceptance – Sometimes it’s hard to share our secrets, even with those we love.
13. Alone Up There – The crew aboard the International Space Station find themselves adrift in a sea of stars.
14. Dog’s Story – The zombie apocalypse isn’t limited to human beings.
15. Thy Neighbor – Two men whose families have been at it for generations might be each other’s only hope.
16. Grim is the Truth – The diary of one survivor of the zombie apocalypse.
17. Two Worlds – When zombies run him out of his home, a young Mexican man heads across the border into America, looking for his brothers.
18. Did Your Mama Ever Tell You the Story of the Day You Were Born? – Everyone has a baby story. Caleb’s involves zombies.
19. BAZK – These guys just want to be rock stars, but zombies keep getting in their way.
20. Like Fish – Brent struggles to hold on to his humanity when the world takes everything away.
21. Ghost Story – When the world is long gone, what happens to those left over?
Someone’s been watching my blog like a hawk so I guess I’ll post a quick update.
I don’t have anything major to announce. Well, I think do. But not yet ;D
That said, I’m working. I’m still querying agents on one manuscript, and I’m working on editing another. I have a few new projects started, but those are coming along pretty slowly, to make more time for editing.
November is coming up, but I’m not sure I’ll participate in NaNoWriMo. I have an idea, but I still have a lot on my plate, it might be wiser to work on those before taking on a new project. We’ll see.
When I’m finished editing this manuscript (which will hopefully be in the next two or three weeks) I may work on editing Six and Seven, and when that’s done I’ll see if I can get it published in a magazine somewhere. I like it a lot, but we’ll see how I feel once I start to pick it apart.
It’s still August but I’m pretty sure I’ll once again not be a Camp NaNo winner.
That’s okay though! Because this time I finished my project. It’s a novella, not a novel, and I didn’t feel comfortable trying to force it to be anything else. So the first draft of “Six and Seven” is finished. I’m going to set it aside for a little while and then come back to it and edit with a fresh set of eyes, and then see if I can get it published somewhere. I’ve taken a brief glance at different publications looking for horror novellas, and there are a few that look great, so we’ll see how that goes once I’ve revised it.
I came up with ideas for two other novellas, both related to this one in some way, and for a time I thought about combining the three into one project for Camp. Considering that would give me a week to dream up these stories and write them down, I don’t think I’m going to try it. There’s no way it wouldn’t end up being very rushed. I need to kick these ideas around, see if I really love them and want to write them, and then let them come to life on their own. That won’t happen if I try to slap them onto paper in seven days.
To all other Camp participants, I hope your projects are going well! Remember to take it easy, don’t rush things, don’t force things, don’t stop having fun.
Faded Pages 