I Won NaNoWriMo

I did it. The story is there. The pacing is a disaster; one of the scenes I wrote twice because I changed my mind about where it should appear, a third of the characters don’t have names, and around the 20th I quit updating my outline. I always have to go back and write in

I Was a Child Freshman English TA

When people ask what books influenced me, they’re usually expecting a list that could double for some Great Books High Literature syllabus, especially if they know my father was an English professor. In fact, my exposure in that genre is pretty sketchy, but it wasn’t because I wasn’t reading. For one stretch of middle school,

Headache Cures

A prosaic post for the middle of NaNo. Disclaimer, not in small print in case you are currently in the throes: I am not a doctor. Sometimes headaches can be the sign of something serious. First pass at a cure: 500 mg of vitamin C 16 oz of water (2 cups or about 250 mL)

Resisting the Chance to Work on the Task at Hand

In psychoanalysis, resistance is what the patient does when things start working—once they get close to the problem issue, patients engage methods to maintain the status quo. Resistance, thy name is Ann Marie Gamble. When I decided to do NaNoWriMo, I decided to work on an idea that I hadn’t done much prep work for.

Sending the Inner Editor on Vacation

I’m an editor in my day job, and I do a lot of wrestling with the issue of ignoring the Inner Editor—at this house, she’s paying the mortgage, so we don’t want her to go on permanent leave. Here are some concrete tricks and a bit of theorizing that I’ve used to help get in

Personality Types: Enneagrams

In a previous post, I talked about discovering a character’s goal, motivation, and conflict as part of the work I do to write. In addition to motivation, I spend some time on their personality more generally: goals are something like “the perfect gift for Mother” and personality is whether this would be adventure or stress