National Novel Writing Month

NaNoWriMo – Day 4

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Quite the productive day today–a morning session of about 3,200 words then an afternoon/evening session of 4,600+ words, which brings me to 18,836 after four days. (The NaNoWriMo calculator on the stats page indicates I’ll be finished on November 11. LOL.)

I also wrote two long chapters today, so you’ll get a double excerpt. Here’s one from Chapter Five, Off Limits:

How a Quonset hut ended up in the middle of a small village in an even smaller valley in Parvan Province was something Mai pondered only briefly. When she saw the Army cots in the area set aside for her and her team, she want to give the captain a sloppy, tearful kiss. She demurred; she had a reputation to uphold, after all. She did, however, give a laugh at the hand-lettered sign pinned to the blankets someone had already hung from the ceiling beams to surround her cot.

“Warning! Female is OFF-LIMITS!!! Hoo-ah!”

Someone had drawn a decent caricature of her in her shalwar and keffiyeh, funny yet flattering.

“Wait’ll y’all see what they did for the latrine,” Hatfield said.

She’d already seen that. It was quite a bit less funny and not flattering, but she wouldn’t make an issue of it. There would come a time when she’d have to pick a battle with one of these guys, and a drawing of her ass hanging out of her pants wasn’t it. She felt good, however, to peel out of the shalwar, stiff with sweat, and take off her boots.  Alex Terrell had explained a local widow did their laundry for a small fee, acceptable work for a widow, and showed her where to put her clothes outside for the woman to pick up in the morning. 

Her uncovered but French-braided hair and the fact the shalwar no longer hid her figure in the BDU pants and desert tan tee-shirt made a few of the men stop talking as she crossed the Quonset to put her dirty clothes in the box outside the door. She did manage to get the door open, drop the clothes, and close it before any villager could see her in such an immodest state. Before she went back behind her curtains she tossed the soldiers, “Old enough to be your mother, remember.” They looked away and went back to their conversations.

And here’s another excerpt from chapter six, Welcome to Kabul:

The last time Mai had been in Kabul, she’d ridden in on a Soviet armored personnel carrier. People had been on the streets then, too, but their hatred of the Soviets she could easily read on their faces. Today, she was atop an old Soviet tank, captured by the Mujahideen toward the end of that former war, well-maintained, and painted with symbols of the Northern Alliance. She could see no anger or hatred, just joy. People cheered and waved, and children ran beside the tank, reaching up to touch the hands of the victors.

Mai’s eyes searched the crowds, hoping against hope for a certain face, even as unlikely as that was. Absent Alexei’s face, she’d hoped to see the faces of women, but mostly men and boys filled the streets. The women she did see, still huddled beneath their burqas. Women, after all, were practical creatures. Just five years before, the Northern Alliance ran Kabul, then overnight, the Taliban chased them out. Now the Northern Alliance was back, but it was too soon to put the burqa in the trash heap. That, and the fact some warlords in the Northern Alliance considered rape a spoil of war.

O’Keefe and the team were somber. They’d lost Gonzalez in a fierce firefight, and the SpecOps guys had made certain his body got shipped home. Mai had tried to stop the blood from leaving his body with her own hands, urged Gonzalez to breathe while the medics worked on him, and she’d been holding his hand when he asked her to make sure his mother knew he thought of her at the end.

She’d lost people on missions before, but this was her team. And, yes, she’d taken it personally. For the first time she really understood how Alexei could enjoy killing.

NaNoWriMo – Day 3

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Update: I added 700 words this evening for a daily total of 4242 and a three-day total of 11,140.

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Combine going to bed at the ungodly hour of 2000, a time change, and an early wake-up, and you get another 3,542 words–and all before starting another jam-packed day of choir rehearsal, choir, and a birthday party for the two best five year olds in the world. That brings a three-day total to 10,440 words. And I’m glad for the cushion because I know there are days ahead where I’ll be lucky to get 1,000 words.

Here’s today’s excerpt from Chapter 3, Power Play:

Boyd Wahler stood before the painting, which had hung in every office he’d ever occupied—when he was a Congressman, a Senator, White House Chief of Staff, National Security Advisor, now Director of the CIA. He had painted it himself, based on a picture someone had snapped of him during his first tour in Vietnam. He stood alone in a field of high grass, a Huey in the background, and stared at something in the distance. Improvised camouflage adorned his helmet, and his rifle pointed at the ground. For the life of him, though, he could not remember what it was that caught his attention, what he stared at so intently. The photo, which he’d carried in his wallet, had long since disintegrated, and he’d done the painting from memory.

It reminded him that, at all times, no matter how many people worked for him or supported him, he always stood alone. When he needed someone to rely on, he could only count on himself. A carry-over from the previous administration, he knew the ground he now stood on was as mine-filled as the fields he trod in Vietnam. He knew, as well, the leverage he had over this Administration would take him only so far. Still, it hadn’t been a difficult call when one of his agents, Winston Everette, had requested Wahler’s presence at Everette’s cubicle in the Executive Office Building.

“Tell Agent Everette I’ll be glad to see him in my office at his earliest convenience,” he’d told his secretary. Her admiring smile had bolstered him for the rest of the day.

 (c)2013 by Phyllis Anne Duncan

NaNoWriMo – Day 2

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A long day today. I had to drive to Richmond, VA, where I spent most of the day. I didn’t get home until after four, but I managed 3,242 words in just about three hours. My two-day total is 6,898, which ain’t bad.

Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote today, from Chapter 2, Arrows of God:

Patience was something else he’d almost forgotten. Living in America, the land of instant gratification, could do that to you, make you forget the best things were the things you waited for with patience. He was fifty-eight years old, far above the life expectancy of the men of this country, even the country of his birth, and if it took him another decade to do what he needed to do, to find the man he wanted to kill, he would wait. With infinite patience.

Above him, quite suddenly, the night screamed, but he didn’t move. He could sense the nervous shuffling of the man at his back. Below, in Mazar e Sharif a mushroom of fire exploded, then another and another.

In Russian, Abdullah said, “Bozh’ya strelki.” Arrows of God.

He nodded in agreement as the explosions lit the city in predetermined locations, some of which he and Abdullah had provided to the CIA. The noise was distant, muffled, and reached him several seconds after the silent flares on the landscape. Satellite guided bombs from B-2s or Tomahawk missiles were modern arrows of a sort, aimed from a distance and true on their mark.

The United States had begun exacting revenge for September 11, 2001.

NaNoWriMo Day 1

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An excerpt from what I drafted today for this year’s NaNoWriMo project, Meeting the Enemy – Book 2: Retribution, Chapter 1, “Twilight in the Tunnels”–

“Alexei,” Sergei said, hand on his brother’s arm, “don’t go out there.”

“I’ll be fine, Sergei. I trust her with my life. If I didn’t she wouldn’t be with me. Besides,” he said, lowering his voice and smiling, “she likes me in bed. We’ll be drinking vodka together, soon, brother. Don’t worry.”

Sergei gripped Alexei’s shoulders with both hands. “Alyosha, I’m sorry for the things I said, about you being a traitor…”

“No need for sentimentality, brother. All that’s in the past. Now, no one is going to die here except maybe that presumptuous Muj out there, eh?” He released his brother before the emotion rose too high. “What do see out there, Mai?”

She waited until he was beside to answer in a low tone. “Just the one,” she said. “What did you say his name was?”

“Osama bin Laden.”

(c)2013 by Phyllis Anne Duncan

Friday Fictioneers and NaNoWriMo

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I’ll make a brief appearance here for Friday Fictioneers, then I’m back to the word count for National Novel Writing Month. I think this year, I’ll pull a paragraph from what I’ve written that day and post it here, and comments are welcomed.

Friday Fictioneers LogoToday’s Friday Fictioneers photo prompt is a little fishy, as in a picture of fishes, koi to be specific, and it brought to mind a hotel I stayed at on the Hawaiian Island of Maui, I believe. The hotel had been around for decades and was surrounded by a moat full of koi. Guests could feed them, and I remember being amazed at the size of them. I don’t know why that surprised me because I know they’re essentially carp, and I’d seen some huge carp in the Washington Channel. At this hotel, when we’d scatter koi food for them, the smaller, younger ones would go into a feeding frenzy while the bigger, older ones swam around the edges waiting for bits of food to get splashed their way. It seems for koi, too, with age comes wisdom.

That memory led to the story “Lure of the Nishikigoi.” As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop-down list.

A Friday Fictioneers Anniversary

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Today marks one year since our fearless leader Rochelle Wisoff-Fields took over the reins of Friday Fictioneers from our intrepid founder Madison Woods, and it’s true. Time flies when you’re having fun. Rochelle has worked tirelessly at making Friday Fictioneers the “go-to” flash fiction site, and her success is marked by the fact that we “charter members” keep going strong while we add new participants every week. Three cheers for Rochelle!

National Novel Writing Month is just a week away, and I’m all set with character sketches, plot outlines, and plenty of enthusiasm thanks to an online workshop put on by my other writers group, Shenandoah Valley Writers. We called the workshop “Finish That Novel!” but we based it on The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray and Bret Norris. The book had some good points and not-so-good points, but the exercises were certainly useful to me in that I realized I needed some back story to make this novel more understandable.

This year’s NaNoWriMo project is Book Two of a series on the attacks of 9/11. The series is called Meeting the Enemy. Book One, drafted after last year’s NaNoWriMo, is Terror; Book Two is Retribution; Book Three is Rendition.

I’m also working on a sequel to my collection of espionage short stories, Spy Flash. Spy Flash II will also be short stories, but they collectively form what’s called a novel in stories. I hope to have that ready to go after the first of the year.

So, I may be going to my last writing workshop of my year of conferencing/workshopping this coming Saturday (“Ending it All” at WriterHouse in Charlottesville), but the writing work continues.

This week’s Friday Fictioneers photo prompt, taken by our fearless leader herself, was a bit of a challenge to the challenge I posed for myself. I’d decided that for the spooky month of October, all my Friday Fictioneers stories would have an edge of the paranormal. This week’s still-life had me scratching my head, wondering how on earth… Then, I remembered the title of a 1982 movie, and off I went from there. My story, “Noisy Ghost,” isn’t quite as scary as that movie, but I hope it’s a little chilling.

As usual, if you don’t see the link on the story title in the paragraph above, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, and select the story from the drop-down list.

My Three Rs: Rereadin’, Rewritin’, and Revisin’

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Some days you have to choose–blogging versus spending quality time with the grandkids and one of your BFFs. Yesterday, the grandkids and the BFF won. So, no blogging, though I did spend a couple of hours in the evening working on the novel rewrite/revision.

I have about forty pages left from the original, rough draft to rewrite/revise. In the process I’ve added about 10,000 words to a manuscript, which was “just” 63,000 words to begin with. I’ve been told 60,000 to 70,000 words is a good length for an MS you’re going to shop to agents. Of course, I’ve also been told, at a different writing conference, that 100,000 words is tops for such an MS. So, who knows?

I think this first revision will end up at about 76,000 words, give or take a thousand. That doesn’t bother me, since the next step–after letting the MS gel a while–is to do a line edit. That should bring me back closer to 70-72,000 words, which I think is enough to tell a story in two time lines.

Why did I add words in a rewrite? Well, that happens sometimes, especially after time has passed since you wrote the draft and a re-read shows you scenes, which have no context. The actions, dialogue, setting, etc., seem to have just fallen from the ether onto the page. The context has to be there, or the reader will spot the disconnect right away. Sometimes the additional material has to be there to make a character two- or even three-dimensional. Other times it’s because what is obvious to the writer isn’t always to the reader. Yes, readers like it when you give them just enough for them to make the leap of logic; however, you can’t give them a chasm to jump. Readers are not Evel Knievel.

Here’s an example: A character in this novel is obsessed with the unborn child of her own son, killed in World War II. It wasn’t enough to just state this. I needed to show examples of this obsession, and this led to a scene of a frenzied woman going to the house where her daughter-in-law has sought refuge from her and making a scene. And of course, I had to write other scenes to show this tendency so that the final scene had context and was believable. Also, of course, those scenes may not stay, but at the time I needed them to understand this character better. You can’t condense until you have the context of the characters, the plot, even the setting.

Another example: Since I made up a town in the Shenandoah Valley, I had to give it a history, some of which is based on three different towns where I’ve resided, as a child, a teenager, and an adult. The history is great–I both researched and relied on my memory, and I’ve created what comes across, to me, as a real place. However, again, how much of that history is essential to the overall story in the novel remains to be seen, but I needed that to fully realize this fictional town in my head.

Of course, this fixation on rewriting/revising means I’ve created very little original material, at least not novel length. I average two pieces of flash fiction a week, which keeps the writing brain engaged. I do, however, miss the process of sitting down and churning out a novel-length work.

Then, again, that’s what NaNoWriMo is for–and that’s only three months away.

Three months? I guess I better start thinking about something new to write.

A Little Respect for NaNoWriMo

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During the critique of my novel excerpt in my Tinker Mountain workshop, I mentioned I’d completed the rough draft during National Novel Writing Month, and a small discussion ensued. The instructor, Fred Leebron, had a dim view of NaNoWriMo based on other workshops where people had submitted excerpts from their own NaNo works. Needless to say he wasn’t impressed.

Another workshop member sneered that NaNoWriMo emphasizes “quantity over quality.” That’s true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean quantity can’t become quality, I pointed out. I referred that person to the website, where the Office of Letters and Lights emphasizes editing and revising a NaNo draft, but I conceded you can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink.

Later, during my one-on-one conference, Leebron admitted that he had a new respect for NaNoWriMo, given the quality of my work and another person’s workshop piece, also from NaNoWriMo. I explained that I do nothing with a NaNo draft for six months, then I pick it up and start revising. I also explained that the first twenty pages I’d submitted for the workshop had been worked and reworked during a writing retreat in May and honed especially for Tinker Mountain. The rest of the draft, I explained, needed a lot of work. Nevertheless, Leebron conceded he had new respect for NaNo but wished that every participant didn’t rush to publish or to submit to workshops before editing. I agree.

Of the two NaNoWriMo-ers in the workshop, I’m the seat of the pants writer. The other was an outliner. Now, I’ve done both, and, in fact, the only other NaNoWriMo MS I’m particularly proud of is one I meticulously outlined before November 1. Last year’s effort came from a germ of an idea in a piece of flash fiction I did for Friday Fictioneers. Either way works, but in some ways it’s the aftermath of NaNoWriMo that matters. The hype goes toward the build-up to November, to the daily word counts, and hitting that 50,000-word mark in thirty days. OLL can’t force you to behave like a professional writer and edit that MS–edit as in critically look at it and revise it into a polished MS. That’s up to the writer.

There are very few–I’d say negligible–writers who can go from a rough draft to a viable published work in those thirty days. For one, since the word count is what’s important, I’m finding that in my revision of last year’s MS, I’m eliminating about three-quarters of the dialogue tags. Using them for every line of dialogue is great for word counting but distracting when reading. Sometimes it’s the small things like that which distinguishes a professional MS from a rank amateur one.

So, I offer this challenge to fellow NaNoWriMo-ers: Do your part to enhance NaNoWriMo’s image in the literary world. Don’t publish that MS right away. Polish it. Edit it. Revise it. Run it through a critique group. Do whatever you need to do to make certain it reflects well on you as a professional writer. Making NaNoWriMo look good is just a pleasant side-effect.

Off to Retreat!

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This week I’ll be at The Porches in rural, central Virginia at a writing retreat put on by one of my writer friends, Mel Walsh Jones. Since it’s my first writing retreat, I’m not sure what to expect, but I’m hoping I get a lot of editing and revising done on the rough draft I completed for last year’s National Novel Writing Month.

Mainly, I’m looking forward to getting away from all the distractions my house and home town can offer and communing with other writers and perhaps a bit with nature. So, a short post today, and I’ll write more about how the retreat went next week, after I return.

No Foolin’

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Today, I could have played a major April Fools joke on the rest of you by “announcing” that I’d just been offered a six-figure advance and a multiple-book contract from one of the “Big Six.” I could have, but I won’t because it’s likely the joke would be on me. So, no advance, no book contract; just constant editing and revising and hoping.

I get frustrated at times with the lack of new material I’m producing. I retired to have more time to write, and I have written more and more constantly than before I retired; but it seems at times that I do more re-writing than writing.

No difference, you say. Writing is writing. True, but I miss the mad rush of researching and drafting that comes with a whole new project. Granted, I participate in National Novel Writing Month every November, which means I have created five, original manuscripts in five years.

The first one was a semi-autobiographical piece, which, after re-reading it, I realized was 200+ pages of self-indulgent whining. It has, however, been a good source of short stories.

The second one I have edited, revised, and re-written to the point where it’s as ready as it will ever be for pitching to possible agents.

For the third one, I took a risk and killed off one of my characters, a bold move that turned out fairly well. It also helped me face the loss of my long-term relationship and address the emotions that involved; however, the character wasn’t ready to die and told me so. The good news is, I’m meshing this manuscript with another one I developed shortly after the events of September 11, 2001. So, all is not lost.

The fourth one is one that I really enjoyed writing. It’s the closest thing to a sci-fi novel I’ve ever written–a story about a dire future after the Tea Party takes over the government. Dark and political, it was a rough draft I was very proud of, and, in fact, the first 5,000 words I submitted for critique in last year’s Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop. The reception it received was awesome. (It helps that the workshop instructor, Pinckney Benedict, is a fan of dystopian fiction.) Then, I re-read Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, for a book club and went, “Oops.” It had been two decades almost since I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, but apparently I channeled Atwood when I wrote my manuscript. (Channeling Atwood could be a good thing.) However, since it got such good feedback, it’s definitely something to work on.

The fifth one, last year, was a completely different work for me, a straight-up literary fiction novel that intersects an event in a small town during World War II with an event in the same town in present day. The protagonist is a successful romance writer married to a not-so-successful novelist, and all is just lovely until they find the bones of a baby in the wall of a room they’re renovating. I always put a NaNoWriMo draft aside for six months before I start revising, so next month is when I’ll pull it out and start polishing it.

So, what am I whining about? Well, after an amazing amount of creativity in the late 1990s and early 2000s wherein I dashed out six novel-length manuscripts featuring my two favorite spies, Mai Fisher and Alexei Bukharin, as they work for the fictional United Nations Intelligence Directorate, I haven’t produced a new novel featuring them since 2002. Yes, I’ve been revising and re-writing all those original manuscripts, but I’ve missed creating a new adventure for them. I have been writing short stories featuring them (Spy Flash, published in December 2012), but aside from that, Mai and Alexei walked away from a mission in 2001; and we’ve heard nothing from them since.

You’ve written all you can about them, you might say. No, I feel they have a lot of adventures in them, and I’ve made notes about those adventures. Merely, focusing on improving my craft and establishing a bit of a name for myself as a flash fiction writer has become my immediate focus.

That’s why I need that multiple-book contract, publishers. I’ve always been well-motivated by deadlines, so take a chance. Tell me you want three books, four, or five, and I’ll get right on them.

Don’t forget, this is National Poetry Month. Take a break from fantasy or cozy mysteries and read a poet you’ve never read before.