Thursday, July 12, 2007

How it all Began, II

There I was, with an entertaining concept that morphed into a couple of scenes. And so it remained for a long time. Turns out I'm no Sylvester Stallone, who famously wrote his Oscar-winning storyline for 'Rocky' in a matter of days, nor Mary Balogh, who even more famously wrote out a chapter per night at her kitchen table after daily chores were done (in pencil! in longhand! - ok, I'm not 100% certain of the last two bits, but they make the story sound better), sent the finished product to the first publisher she found in the phone book, and was promptly offered a contract.

It took me the better part of a year to commit to systematically pursuing the story till it was done. Having figured out that it would take forever for me to finish on my own, I started surfing the web for help. Among all the questionable sites on the web designed to lure starry-eyed neophyte writers, I found a gem: http://www.nanowrimo.org/.

National Novel Writing Month takes place every November, with thousands of participants determined to write 50,000 words from scratch. So with an unfinished novel languishing in my harddrive, I of course did the logical thing and started another.

Cupid and a Suitcase was born.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I had a ball when I did NaNoWriMo this past year. I got a full novel out of it and I'm currently shopping it around. Contests like that are great motivation.