Friday, January 25, 2013

Happenings In The Outhouse 25-Jan-2013 / Am I really an outliner, or still a discovery writer?

As I wind down on this month and my list of short stories (nope I probably won't get all 10 completed, which I am okay with), I'm also preparing to write my new novella titled Guest of Honor.  I'm going to treat this as a NaNoWriMo project, which means for the month of February I have to write a minimum of 1,786 words a day for the 28-day month--that comes to 50,008 words for all of you math geeks out there.

A strange thing happened when I started preparing a little for it.  When I wanted to write down the characters' names and a little about the story, I felt this inner tug in my brain to quit.  Not quit writing.  Quit outlining.

I'm not an outliner and I really didn't consider it outlining, but in a basis sense that's what I was doing.  So I quit outlining.  Let's see how it works.  I have five completed novels, none of which I outlined.  I have dozens of short stories (10 of which I've selected to be worked on this month) and not a one was outlined.

So why start now?

Oh, don't worry.  I won't.  I'll write it like I always do . . . and it'll turn out great.

One last note.  Remember (I believe it was last week but don't quote me on it) I talked about researching for a new book, based on the recent Iraq War?  Well, since I don't have the time to interview any vets, and even if I found some I probably wouldn't know what to say to them anyway except to let them talk, I found a few books.  I won't post them here, but feel free to go to my Goodreads site to see which ones they are.

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