run to the breakers

So just like every year, the nanowrimo site has been down and out for the last two days. The widget I put up here in the sidebar to track my progress is on the fritz too. Rest assured I did NOT write zero words yesterday (in fact I wrote a little over 5,000, which is my daily goal for the month.) If it doesn’t start working soon I’ll just swap it out for a simpler one that reports only the total word count and doesn’t track daily progress

With October half over and National Novel Writing Month only a few weeks away, I added a new widget to the sidebar. Over the course of November it will track my progress as I write the sequel to Skeleton Army.

Watch in awe as I drop a novel in a month (and then spend the next six months making it worth actually reading.)

A lot of stuff coming up real quickly: last week I hired an artist to do the cover art for Skeleton Army, today or tomorrow I’m sending off the manuscript to my editor for a run-through, couple weeks and nanowrimo will be upon us (and with it, the writing of the sequel to SA, Locks of Clay.)

Once the cover art is done I’ll probably throw up a little teaser, though I probably won’t FINALIZE the design until december. So far I like the guy I hired and I really like the direction he’s going with the art. Expect a strong recommendation at the end of the job, if things continue the way they’re going.

Looking forward to finally getting the manuscript to my editor too - can’t wait to get it back and get going on the next draft either.

And of course I’m chomping at the bit to get going on Locks of Clay.  I’ve got notes scattered across three different laptops, so I need to get them consolidated.  But so far I feel like this one will be light years better (at least in the first draft) than the first one.

So the nanowrimo webpage is scheduled to go down soon, only to emerge triumphant on 1 October, stripped clean and ready to go.  A month after that and the madness will start again.

If you’re unfamiliar, nano is essentially an event where tens (hundreds?) of thousands of enthusiastic folks from all walks of life (and all over the world) tackle the daunting task of writing an entire novel from scratch in a short thirty days.  It’s humbling to watch the words stack up, and how QUICKLY they stack up, both for total numbers and for the individual regions.

Of course, I have the honor of writing for Seattle (greater seattle really, as we have folks from the east side, folks from the north end, folks from the south, even some from the peninsula who throw in with us) which has put up the most words of any other region for the last two years running.  Of course, two years ago was my first year participating… coincidence?

We also end up with a pretty high per-writer total too though, and a respectable number of completions (people who have reached the goal of 50k words by the end of the month.)

Personally my goal is 100k, and while I fell far short in ‘06 (topped out in the low 60s) I came much closer last year and then came back to it last spring to put on the finishing touches.  This year I’d like to actually FINISH, but the more reasonable goal I’ll be setting is just to hit 100k and finish up later.  (Of course, my editor will be done with the first pass on Skeleton Army halfway through the month, which might end up distracting me.)

Skeleton Army, by the way, is my 2007 nano, and will be the first book published by Roosevelt Books.  The sequel will be written during nano 2008, and after that who knows?  (I have lot of ideas floating around for these characters and this world is what I am trying to say)