Chibify Me!

Okay, I'm no longer in a decadent pool of laziness. Which honestly is good. I can only sit around doing nothing all day for a short time before I'm bored. Unless I'm playing Don't Starve. I have lost days to Don't Starve when I was working for the Co-operators and I was on a weeklong vacation. 

The Don't Starve binge itself only lasted a day or so past the last post. I am still being a bit lazy though... I'm only working on about 3 hours a day right now, but I am cleaning and doing everything else, so I'm calling it a good start. 

Most of my office is finished. I have a desk-full of odds and ends to find homes for, some art supplies to get rid of, and a stupidly large amount of card decks to find homes for (I buy them for the pictures and because I like playing solitaire and other card games). Also, I haven't even been able to start on my closet yet. That said, its really coming along. 

I started writing again a few days ago and have finished 3 chapters in Noble's Choice so far. I remember where the plot is going, have reworked things that weren't working well in my original draft and streamlined the plot. Originally one of the characters was supposed to be a very important villain, for example, and now he's just a distracting sub-villain. The story is coming together though, which I love. I want my rough draft finished before the end of March. 

I have also talked to my editor. She is expecting that it will probably take a month to get Lord's Curse back to me, so I'll be spending Camp Nanowrimo (April) making one last round of changes before we can start on the final proofreading edits. 

The other update I have is in my art. I jokingly mentioned that I wanted to draw a Chibi-Me and a Koi playing Don't Starve Together. While I had a picture of a koi, I didn't really have a chibi of me lying around. So I drew this one. 

I'm not 100% happy with it yet. There is something about the shape of the eyes that seems off to me and I want to work on the hair more. That said, I am very pleased with it. Its the level of detail I want and she is adorable AF. I dressed her in my favourite outfit, a pair of yoga pants and a sweatshirt. You can't see it, but she is totally wearing a comfy tank top under the sweater. Also, I had to give her ears and a tail. Because I can. 

What do you think of her? Have any of you ever drawn your own Chibi-Me? 

So Close

I can practically taste the victory already. 50,000 words are just ahead of me.

I'm currently on track with 46,694 words. Depending on how early I finish writing this, I may have time to get in more before midnight. Which does mean that I'll be keeping this short.

The story is going swimmingly. I just got into the middle. All of the villains have been introduced and all of the major incidents have been shown. All of my characters have been having their chance to stand in the sun, and I've even introduced a new viewpoint pov character. I discussed the plot over with my husband and I am brimming with ideas to bring all bits of the story together at the end. I'm expecting the rough draft to sit at 75k-80k when done and 50k of that should be finished by the first.

I'd like to have it finished before I start editing Lord's Curse, but I'll have to see when that gets back to me. I have a deadline as soon as the story is back in my hands so that deadline will be the priority though. I'd rather get the second book ready to send to you than make sure that book 4 is roughly finished. I should be ordering the cover soon, I'm expecting sometime in the next few weeks so hopefully, I'll have a reveal coming out to you sometime in January or February.

And that is all that I think I got for you this time around. Until next week, keep reading!

Nano Update

Every Nanowrimo, I eventually suffer from a condition I have dubbed "Nano-Squishy-Brain". Nano-Squishy-Brain happens when you've kicked your own ass so hard from writing that you feel happily exhausted and want nothing more than to melt into a happy ball of goo that never has to think about writing again. It's indicative of pushing oneself harder than is perhaps warranted. For some, it's writing 500 words a day, for others its writing 2k a day or even writing 20k in a day. For some, its caused by working and going for your 50k at the same time.

For me, it normally happens around the 3rd week of Nanowrimo while working a full-time job. This year, it hit me about eight days in. I had no idea why, until I remembered that I'd been kicking my own ass to finish my novel and getting it over to my editor before November. I ended up taking two or three days off to rest, play some Don't Starve and relax. Now, after that rest and a 5k day, I'm still tired, but nowhere near as tired as I had been. I've gotten caught back up and should have no problem finishing Nano. 

The plot of this book is going much better than last year's. I'd made the unforgivable error of not reading book 3 before trying to write book 4, which meant that I'd forgotten a lot of the little things. Emotions, tiny incidents that would end up being a huge deal in the next book. This means that while I'm about 1/3 of the way through the rough draft, this book is already leaps and bounds better than the one I tried to write last year. I'm hoping to finish writing it as soon as I'm done editing Lord's Curse and then moving on (almost immediately) to editing book 3 (which will make all of my helpful little notes during this read-through useful).

I am still searching for a day job, and I have a dozen other little things I'm trying to complete, like writing up back cover copy so I can contact my cover artist about a cover for this one and getting a website up. I will probably order the cover as soon as I have the back cover written so that I can at least do a cover reveal while figuring out the physical details I'll need to get for her. Hopefully, I will have all that figured out for you by mid-December. The website may be longer since I need to design it and figure out how to transfer over my current blog to it and look into all of the programming details. Since I am not a programmer, I'll just say that one is a way's off for now.

I will add that I haven't had any real art time in the last few weeks and I'm feeling it now. I am looking forward to really playing around with digital art in December. 

How is your Nanowrimo doing? And if you aren't writing, is there any other challenge you're doing this month?