Read Tuesday- tomorrow!

Dear blogging friends,
I encourage you, no implore you as fellow lovers of words, to check out Read Tuesday tomorrow! It's like Black Friday for books, and there are some fantastic authors participating (yours truly included, though I'm not claiming to label myself fantastic. Well, ok maybe I am a little ;) ).

If you're really dedicated you can search for my deals on their website, or you can check back here tomorrow for my info!
Thanks and happy book-buying!

IWSG - December!

This post is part of the Insecure Writer's Support Group, a bloghop dedicated to writers supporting one another through this crazy thing called 'being a writer'. 

I'm sure a lot of us IWSG folks are posting today about National Novel Writing Month, as a lot of us are the nutty types who would dedicate a whole month to high word counts and (perhaps more importantly) cheering one another along while we accomplish that novel writing thing. I have, happily, won NaNo for my second year. This year I worked on two projects and had intended to spend my time on them about equally, but got swept up in one so the division ended up being more like 70/30. Regardless, I finished! Hooray. See? I have a lovely badge to prove it!

It's been kind-of a rough semester (since August things have been.. intense.. around here) so it was nice to set my mind to something and actually achieve it. I guess my IWSG this month is not so much that I'm feeling insecure, but more that I'm feeling more secure and happy in my writing than I have in a while. Is that allowed? (sorry Alex if I'm breaking the rules! ha)

This morning on my drive to work I thought of a new project and I'm a bit in love with it. I need to finish my NaNo novel first (I'd feel awful leaving it to gather dust!) so I'll take some notes and wait a bit to get into the new idea. But I'm happy that my brain has decided to continue with the writing trend!

What do you do when your writing ego needs a boost? Tell stories to kids who will just tell you they're great? Daydream about who would play your MC in the movie version? Something crazy like NaNoWriMo?

Happy Thanksgiving weekend!

AKA NaNoWriMo cram time! I've not had an easy time of keeping up with my NaNo words this year, so the weekend is pretty much dedicated to writing and eating leftovers. Not a bad life, really. My plan today is to alternate hours of writing with hours of chores. I'm hoping that this way I can get lots of both done and can end my day feeling good about the general state of things.
My NaNo word goal for the day is 5,000. Totally do'able!

A snippet from this morning's writing, then back to it for me: "David lived in the suburbs on a street lined by homes with big front porches and small back yards." My MC is investigating people and this guy is boorrrrrrinnnnnng.. 

Oh I guess it's Black Friday or something, too. Overwhelming day. I'll stay here with my words, thanks!

How are you spending your weekend?

RIP RA Montgomery

I was sad to learn today of the passing of RA Montgomery, of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) fame. He was the original publisher of the series - then titled The Adventures of You - and went on to write tons of CYOA books. The bio that is posted on his obituary at the CYOA website shows that he was an extremely cool guy. Not only did he publish and write loads of books, he also worked extensively with the Peace Corps and believed strongly in the value of games as teaching tools.

Montgomery also believed in the power of his books to encourage readers and improve literacy, and I think that he was right. So many people have told me, when I tell them about Armageddon being a Pick Your Plot book, that they read TONS of the CYOA books as kids. There is a heavy nostalgia there, and for good reason - the CYOA books drew thousands of young readers into reading. That is part of the reason that we are participating in Read Tuesday this year - to throw our names into the hat as people who support literacy, and also to get our name out there to folks who are looking for great books to help teach young people to love reading the same way that Dan & I do.

RIP RA Montgomery. Thank you for the work and love you put into everything you did, for inspiring thousands of people to love reading, and for developing a genre of fiction that I love writing.

Stuffz happening, y'all!

Some updates! 

• National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is going well! I'm a little behind but passed 15,000 words yesterday so am still feeling good about finishing my 50k by the end of November. The typical second week tiredness is starting to set in, as exemplified by this accidentally punny typo from yesterday, "The lifting mechanism ground to a hault." Yup. Winning.
• We are super excited to be participating in Read Tuesday events on December 9th! This is a one day 'Black Friday' type of event, just for books! The goal of the event is to support literacy as well as independent authors by encouraging folks to purchase books, at a temporarily discounted price. Books make great gifts and I'm looking forward to participating with Armageddon :)
• And, tomorrow we're doing the big 2015 April A-Z Team reveal over at the blog! Come check it out to find out who my partners in crime will be for this year's Challenge!

Other than that, life is mostly about staying warm. It's a balmy 2 degrees here today, so I've been trying to stay indoors as much as possible and drinking buckets of tea.

How are y'all doing?

IWSG - November

This post is part of the Insecure Writer's Support Group, a bloghop dedicated to writers supporting one another through this crazy thing called 'being a writer'. 

Ohhh National Novel Writing Month.. What a frenzy of excitement, activity, insecurity and support! I'm going rogue, so working on two different projects, both of which were already started. One is heavily outlined and I've been so excited to get finished and moving forward to the editing stage, the other I've just dabbled at through the last two years or so. I have no real idea where that story is going. So my projects are a combination of planning and pantsing, which so far has worked alright. If I'm feeling focused I'll work on the former, and if I just need to be creative I'll work on the latter. 

But I'm starting behind due to being gone at a wedding last weekend and there is a LOT going on this month. So the freaking out side of me is somewhat in 'omg I'll never make it through NaNo!' mode. I guess the best thing to do is just keep typing, eh? And probably make sure that if I'm doing blog posts I'm not writing anything too long hah

Any other IWSG folks also doing NaNo? How's it going?