the league of reluctant adults

We Leaguers are an industrious if pervy lot. And occasionally, one of us hits pay dirt. In this case, a huge SHOUT OUT to Leaguer Cherie Priest, the High-Priestess of Steampunk who yesterday announced her movie deal of Boneshaker . Just three weeks ago she was in Denver signing at the Broadway Book Mall. Soon, with luck and our tarnished blessings, she'll be in the position to greet us when we arrive at the gilded gates of her 1% estate, hats in hand, and she'll announce: "Release the hounds." With the beginning of December comes the end of NaNoWriMo. How did you all do? I made my goal, which was to finish the first draft of a work in progress. A very ugly baby to be sure. But at least I have something to vivisect and reattach parts to. As much as we love NaNoWriMo, good intentions are not enough. They need your help, as in cashola. So dig out those spare coins rattling in your tattered pocket and send them here to keep the NaNoWriMo furnace stoked until 2012.

Howdy folks! I'm doing Nanowrimo this year, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on how to engage with National Novel Writing Month successfully. "But you haven't even finished successfully, Dr Peeler," readers may be thinking. "You are only halfway done!" This is true. But what I've noticed these first two weeks is that Nanowrimo is mostly what writers do, when they're on deadline. A few thousand words a day is not much for us, especially if we write genre fiction. On Twitter, writers with contracts for 3-4 books a year (a pretty standard number for those who actually make a living writing) often talk about writing five thousand or more words per day . And that's partly why I like Nanowrimo as a learning experience for aspiring writers. It's nice to think of writing as this wonderful enterprise where one sits in a puddle of sun, scribbling and laughing and eating bonbons. The truth is much uglier, oftentimes a bit smellier, and definitel...

We've made it to November. Whew! That means it's time for... NaNoWriMo! National Novel Writing Month. If you've got the novel-writing itch, then scratch it with NaNoWriMo. This year I’m an official participant because I need to finish a work-in-progress. Right now, I’m what is charitably called “in-between-contracts,” which in industry parlance means I got bupkis in terms of book contracts. This year my publishing credits were limited to a short story in the mystery anthology, You Don’t Have A Clue , and an essay in the collection, An Elevated View--Colorado Writers on Writing. Since my last contract I’ve been fielding proposals--the first three chapters, an outline, and a synopsis--in hopes of scoring an advance before I have to write the whole manuscript. I got nibbles on three proposals with this caveat: the editors want to see the completed manuscripts. Ugh. So enough pounding my pud, time to finish one story and send it off. That’s where NaNoWri...

If you're a writer, the gossip is all about what you are doing as part of Na tional No vel Wr iting Mo nth. The goal: 50,000 words in 30 days. Simple math breaks it down: 1666.66 words a day. Doable, unless you slog at the keyboard like I do. For me, 1500 words in one day is a huge deal and frankly even that pace wears me out after a few days. Thanks God for Happy Hour to recharge the batteries. Now in full disclosure, I'm not really participating in NaNoWriMo because I have a manuscript due before Thanksgiving and I'm about ten chapters shy of finishing. And unlike NaNoWriMo which discourages you from editing if it interferes with the word count, I can't turn in my manuscript without beating it with my harshest editorial club. If you're intimidated by the blinking cursor on your monitor, there's a saying to help prod you into starting those first words: Give yourself permission to write crap. Well my first draft is so full of crap that I have to wear rubber b...