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ROW80: The First Week

Week 1 of ROW80, and the second full week of my fall quarter, is complete! For me, the past seven days has been a crash course in organization, scheduling, and trying my darndest to work at my various projects and responsibilities consistently. Reviewing everything that I managed to do (and those few things that fell by the wayside), I’d say that I’ve done mostly well in reaching my goals.

Writing. I pledged to spend 8-10 hours on WIP-related tasks, and judging from my count, I managed to reach 8 hours. A couple of those were spent struggling through an idea I had for a novella, and the rest with brainstorming and plotting for NaNoWriMo. I also had a chance to write a short flash fiction piece for the “Ghouls Galore” writing challenge I’ve decided to tackle for October. It’s a fun challenge — 4 creepy ghouls over 4 weeks. My first piece is “The Fourth Floor,” about a haunted mansion, one very angry poltergeist, and two high school students who are in way over their heads.

Thesis: I had a really hard time digging into the thesis this week. I originally projected that I would work on it for about 8 hours, and I think I managed to squeeze in maybe 5 or 6. My attention span has been virtually non-existent, though, and I can’t really handle more than 1 hour of work at a time. However, I think I should have the draft of this chapter finished by Sunday night. It’s far from perfect, but I really need to have feedback on it before I go any further. Cross your fingers that I can score a meeting with my advisor in the next week or so!

Exercise: I had hoped to work out 4 or 5 days this week, and I successfully got on my glider 4 times. My clothes are starting to fit better, and I’ve been able to liberate a few items out of my “too small to fit right now” pile, so this is a plus. Now I just have to maintain my momentum, and not fall by the wayside like I always seem to do.

Random things that I’ve learned:

Reading dense theory takes a sickening amount of time, especially when I’m trying to absorb material and take notes. I can speed-read an academic chapter (roughly 45-50 pages long) in two hours; I need over three hours if I want to do a good job of understanding things.
On the other hand, reading fun novels takes no time at all! In two days I have read the first two novels in Karen Marie Moning’s Fever series, and I am holding myself back from devouring the last three. I made a major library run the other day, and have Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker in queue, as well as Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches.
I seem to be evolving into a disgustingly cheerful morning person — not sure how I have managed this, but I am grateful.

So, yeah, overall I’d say that I’m off to a decent start. I’ll be recalibrating things as I go (for example, do I need to spend 8 hours each week on the thesis, or can I do what I need to do with fewer hours?), but for the moment, I think tackling time targets is working well for me.

As a side note, I just want to add that I’m really grateful that I have friends in town who force me to go out and have a social life. I’ve had my nose to the grindstone for the entire week, trying to juggle everything, and I probably would work straight through the weekend if I didn’t have people forcing me to leave the house. Tonight I was persuaded to go out for dinner, and tomorrow I’ll be back to the weekly ritual of church with one of my friends. Then I will get to spend the afternoon at the movies with another buddy of mine. We are going to see Real Steel, and I will have 2 hours to fangirl squeal over the magnificence that is Hugh Jackman. Granted, I still have a research abstract to write, and thesis edits to do, and roughly 150 pages more theory to read, but I suppose having some relaxation time is important as well. 😀

How’s the first week gone for everyone else? Any need to tweak goals yet, or are things progressing swimmingly for the moment?

ETA: I would totally love to have a ROWbuddy for this round! I have no specific requirements, but it would be grand to have someone about for general encouragement, and maybe to do some writing sprints, especially as NaNoWriMo approaches. I am in the Pacific time zone (U.S. west coast); Twitter and email are my favorite modes of communication.

ROW80: The Party’s Here!

October 5, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 22 Comments

I’ve been having so much fun dancing to ABBA, drinking pina coladas and nomming on cupcakes and jalapeno poppers and pizza that I almost forgot to write my mid-week ROW80 check-in post! So here I am, reporting in on the progress I’ve made on my goals so far. Feel free to munch on some cake while you read on.

Oh, and have a mimosa, too. Fresh berries have been added in for garnish. 😀

Mimosas, anyone?

I wanted to thank everyone for all the awesome comments on my first post, though I had to laugh at all the comments about how organized I am! I have to admit, trying to become an organized person has been the quest of my life. I was always the kid who forgot her homework in her desk, or at home, or lost it in her backpack. And I was always the kid who was chronically late to class (though this was more my mom’s fault that mine), who managed to lose pens and pencils and shoes and toys…

So the whole “let’s get organized” quest (can we make that a song and sing it to the beat of “Let’s Get Physical” by Olivia Newton-John?) is a little scary for me, and something I’ve been trying to attempt for a long, long time.

Thus far, my attempt at following a schedule has been fairly successful. My classes are all in the morning, and after a few months of staying up till roughly 3 or 4 am, and not getting up till 11 am, adjusting has proven a bit difficult (but not impossible).

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that when my alarm goes off each morning, I need to launch myself out of bed and not look back. I tried this Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday mornings, and ended up jazzed, energized, and super energetic for the rest of the day. Tuesday I decided to just lay in bed for a couple of hours and blogsurf, and yiiiiikes… I dragged the entire day.

Anyway, here are the concrete accomplishments this week:

Thesis-izing: Progressing a bit slowly here. I got in roughly 30 minutes yesterday, but ended up taking a nap because I was so low on energy. I’ve actually been feeling a little down about my work and its importance, but after seeing Prof. Melissa Harris-Perry speak at my campus last night, I had a sudden resurgence of excitement about my work and the direction it might take for the dissertation. For the record, MHP is an amazing public intellectual, an inspirational black feminist, and a dynamic speaker, and I got her autograph and a picture with her. Seriously, I’m still giddy over this.

Work on WIPs: I’ve been doing a little outlining and brainstorming for NaNo, which is proving interesting. I think the project I’ll be tackling is actually going to end up being written in the 1st person, so I’m trying to get into that mode by reading some of my favorite 1st person novels (Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander and Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Dart series). I’ve also been trying to write this new story that hit me the other day, but words are proving difficult to come by. I’m hoping that wears off over the next few days.

Social Media: I’m a little behind on visiting everyone’s blogs, but hopefully I’ll catch up by the weekend. I have to say, though, that I have been having way too much connecting with all my ROW80 peeps today. 😀

Exercise: I worked out Sunday and Monday mornings, and I’m hoping to get some time in on my glider tonight, so I’m on schedule to meet my goal of working out 4-5 days this week.

And there we have it! I’m hoping that all my energy and excitement for tackling goals and responsibilities and whatnot continues throughout the end of the week. In the meantime, I offer a few more party pics…

Cupcakes for all!

And we can’t forget the mixed drinks. What’s a party without something cold and tasty in a martini glass?

Finally, I will be rocking my giant 80s hair for all of you as I prance around in my favorite sparkle shoes and froufy dress and dance to the party playlist. Be sure to swing by the other ROW80 partiers and wish them well!

ROW80: Wrapping Up Round 3

September 22, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 9 Comments

With my mom in town and school starting back today, it’s been a busy few days since our last check-in. Mom and I have been out every day except for Wednesday, I’ve been doing a ton of driving for all of our adventuring, and I had a major case of the freak-outs yesterday, when I saw the syllabus for one of my classes (so many books and articles, I think my eyeballs will roll out of my head by December). I calmed myself down by remembering that this really isn’t anything new, but yikes, it was definitely a scary moment.

But onto fun things! Today marks the end of ROW80’s Round 3, and it is both an exhilarating and bittersweet feeling. Reflecting on Round 3, I’ve come to appreciate all the more the length and nature of this writing challenge. Having 80 days to work towards a set of goals, and being encouraged to be flexible with them if necessary, has been exactly what I’ve needed.

These were my initial goals for Round 3 (I actually had to look them up, because I changed them more than once, and forgot what the original ones were):

Write an average of 500 words/day on any project. This means that I’m doubling my Round 2 word count goal, which makes me slightly nervous, but we’ll see how it goes! I found myself exceeding the original 250 words/day goal consistently, so I don’t think this increase will be too burdensome.

Complete Act 2 of Path to the Peacock Throne, and resist the urge to do too much editing to Act 1.

Move from brainstorming and world-building tell me no lies to working on the first draft.

I ended up exceeding the daily word count quite a bit when I tackled CampNaNo in August. While I didn’t complete Act 2 of PATH TO THE PEACOCK THRONE, I did write over 50k for TELL ME NO LIES, which was a feat in and of itself. I also wrote roughly 13K for STRANGE BEDFELLOWS, although I’ve placed that on the back-burner for the moment.

I had a few other goals for the summer, in particular finishing the 1st draft of my MA thesis. I haven’t finalized the draft, but I did manage to write over 12.5K, retool the theoretical framework, and outline the remainder of the “results” section. I was feeling a little down about not having everything finished and wrapped up. However, I ran into my advisor at the grocery store the other day (oh, the perils of going to school in a small town), who told me to “take my time” finalizing the project. Definitely lifts a little of the pressure off my shoulders, though I do have my own timeline (defending by December?) that I’d like to maintain.

So that’s Round 3! Lots of success, lots of challenges, and lots of surprises. The best part, though, are all of the wonderful people I have met along the way, and who have been an amazing source of support and inspiration. I’m looking forward to ROCKING THE ROW with all of you when Round 4 starts on October 3rd!

In the meantime, I’m off for a visit with my younger sister this weekend, and to have a bit more fun with my mom before she returns back home next Wednesday. After that, it’ll be back to the grind of studying, thesisizing, teaching, and hopefully squeezing in time to work on my WIPs. I haven’t actually written much of anything in the past two or three weeks, and it’s starting to make me feel a little crazy.

I have a few ideas for my Round 4 goals, and I as I’ll be taking Kristen Lamb’s “Blogging to Build Your Brand” class, I’m sure some of these goals will include retooling and refining my blog. I also need to figure out which project I’m going to tackle for November’s NaNoWriMo, but I’ll be chatting more about this once October rolls around.

That’s all for now, ROW80 friends (you can find everyone here). Hope to see you all on October 3rd!

ROW80: A New Name, and Some Plotting

September 11, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 32 Comments

ROWers, the end of Round 3 is almost upon us! Here’s my short recap for the past few days:

The Grand Name Change happens at midnight! If you see “Lena Corazon” pop up on your Twitter feed, don’t be alarmed — it’s just me. In order to ease the transition as much as possible, I’ll be using WordPress’s site redirect service. This means that anyone who heads to jamilajamison.wordpress.com will automatically be sent to the new site (which should be lenacorazon.wordpress.com, unless someone steals it from me before midnight). So hopefully people don’t get too confused, but I’ll have a sticky announcement up on my front page with an explanation, just in case. For my Writers’ Campaign folks, I’ll send an announcement to Rach so she can put it on Friday’s announcement board.

I’ve returned to edits for TELL ME NO LIES in earnest. I plan to dig into the suspense and thriller aspects of the novel, tweaking the murder plot and adding in the details of the police investigation (this involves research into 19th century forensic techniques — fun!). I’m also putting on my sociologist’s cap, trying to consider the larger political and social ramifications presented by the novel’s main conflict: a serial killer is preying upon “ladies of the stage” in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. While these ramifications will play out in the background of the tale, they will, of course, have a major impact on my protagonists and their attempts to hunt down the killer.

I continue to make time for reading. I’m about halfway through Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a book that seems to defy genre. I’ve heard it described variously as “post-cyberpunk,” “futuristic steampunk,” and “math fiction.” I’ll just say that it is speculative fiction at its best, and presents a futuristic world where nanotechnology is the norm, nation-states have been replaced by a proliferation of tiny city-states/semi-sovereign communities, and “Anglo-Americans” have returned to elements of Victorian culture in the form of dress, aesthetics, and etiquette. Stephenson is one of the most amazing masters of world-building, so I am simultaneously taking notes, marveling at his skill, and, of course, enjoying the story.

Finally, I’m obsessed with The Civil Wars, an awesome folksy music duo that’s making some gorgeous music. Adele apparently went to one of their concerts and declared that it was the greatest live show she had ever attended. I’ll have a chance to test this claim, as they’re coming to Santa Barbara in November. They’re offering one of their live albums for free download, along with their first single, “Barton Hollow,” is available for free download, but I’m going to share “To Whom It May Concern” with you. It’s my favorite song off the album (the lyrics resonate with my inner hopeless romantic), and I’ve been listening to it non-stop.

I’m also considering the slate of fall writing courses that have surfaced online, including Tiffany Lawson Inman’s The Triple Threat Behind Staging a Scene, and Kristen Lamb’s class on Blogging To Build Your Brand. I’d like to do them both, but I’m trying to be careful with what I add to my plate, since this is going to be a busy fall quarter. But we’ll see! It’s hard to pass up two incredibly amazing opportunities like these. 😀

That’s about it for me. Check in with the rest of the intrepid ROW80 cohort here, and cheer them on as we enter the final stretch of this round.

ROW80: A Rose by Any Other Name…

August 28, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 33 Comments

It’s been a jam-packed few days, dominated by helping my sister move in to her new apartment in time for the school year to begin. I spent most of Thursday and Friday either packing, driving, or unpacking, but in the midst of everything, I snagged a few spare moments to work on my NaNo tale.

I’m happy to report that I have less than 6.5K to write before CampNaNo ends on the 31st. While the story is in no means complete, I have an amazing foundation in place. I’m looking forward to crafting a world around my characters, beefing up my use of steampunk technology, tightening the mystery/thriller elements of the plot, and weaving in bits of backstory and alternative history. Editing, I think, might end up being more fun than writing the first draft.

The other thing that has been on my mind is the question of choosing a pseudonym. I’ve been pretty lax about keeping my writing and non-writing lives separate. With the school year looming before me, however, the urge to protect my writing activities from Google-obsessed colleagues and students has become much stronger.

Adopting a penname is a difficult decision to make because I like my name. Granted, it’s a name that is often butchered and mispronounced, so I’ve learned to respond to countless variations (“Jamz” is the most recent, bestowed upon me by my grad school colleagues), but all the same, it represents who I am.

Most importantly, my name feels like an almost-tangible link to a rich tapestry of family history, one that is made all the more complex by my multiracial heritage. Jamison, my mother’s maiden name, connects me with a family tree that has been traced back to the Civil War, when the Emancipation Proclamation freed my many-times removed great-grandmother from slavery. Sinlao, my father’s last name, connects me to the Philippines, where my dad lived until he was 15. I feel strongly about being both black and Filipina, and the thought of discarding name and identity is troubling.

Still, a pseudonym is necessary. I want to write, I want to publish, and I want to build a presence on social media that won’t infringe upon my professional career. The only way I can do this without stressing out is to just pick a darn penname and move on.

To stem the inevitable existential crisis, I’ve crafted a name that hearkens back to my roots. I’m adopting “Lena Corazon” as my writing name, “Lena” after my maternal great-great grandmother, and “Corazon” as my private homage to Corazon Aquino, the first female president of the Philippines.

I’ve spent the past couple of days trying it out. Slowly but surely, I’m making it my own, scribbling it in my writing notebook, setting up Gmail and G+ accounts, and, er, dropping it in conversation whenever I can (I think my mom is getting sick of hearing about it. :p). Once I can set up WordPress’ site redirection service, I’ll switch over my blog address and Twitter account name as well. The thought is a little scary and rather bizarre, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. 😀

So that’s me for the week! I will be traveling most of Sunday, heading back to SF, which means that comments and whatnot may be sparse from me over the next day or two. In the meantime, I wave my pom-poms of encouragement for all of my ROW80 compatriots as we near the end of Round 3. Keep up all the wonderful work, friends!

ROW80: A Ray of Sunshine

August 24, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 23 Comments

I write this after having a day of unplanned relaxation. It wasn’t my intention; Sunday and Monday were epic workdays where I made major headway on framing the arguments for my current thesis chapter, as well as outlining tell me no lies. However, I woke up to sunshine streaming through my windows. Given that the past few weeks have looked like this…

That is rain on the window. Yes, in AUGUST.

and this…

Mid-day, and already dark and dreary. Ugh.

…it’s little surprise that I abandoned working for laying out in the backyard with a book.

As a result, I’m slightly behind on my writing goals, which means I need to write roughly 3200 words today to catch up. I’m a little worried about how things are going to go this weekend, as I’ve been tapped to drive to Los Angeles so I can help my mom move my sister into her new apartment before school starts. We’ll be staying at my apartment in Santa Barbara to help break up the trip a little bit, which is definitely exciting — I miss my deck garden, and I left a few things behind that I’d like to pick up. Still, I’m not sure exactly how much I’m going to get done, so I am resigning myself to the fact that I might not make 50K by the end of the month.

However, not all was fun and games today! I wrote a silly blog post about my first story, and more importantly, I finally battled the mess of my Google reader.

ROW80: Trying to Shake the Panic

August 21, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 19 Comments

I’m trying to reconcile myself to the fact that August is rapidly coming to a close. The thought fills me with a bit of melancholy. My younger sister will be headed back to LA for her sophomore year of college at the end of the week, and I’ll be leaving for Santa Barbara in about a month. In the meantime, I have a lot of work to do on the thesis, and I’m feeling that familiar wave of panic over getting this first draft completed.

I’m also starting to stress out about the workload that I’ll have to tackle in the upcoming quarter: finishing and defending the thesis, taking two seminars, and teaching two discussion sections is a lot more than I’ve had to deal with in a while. I haven’t taught a discussion section in over a year, and while I love being in front of a classroom, I’m definitely a little rusty. Add this to the fact that I’m actually just tired of taking classes (only 4 left till I’m free of them!), and it makes for a fair amount of trepidation.

Anyway, onto some positive things. The highlights for the week included:

Catching up on my CampNaNo word count. tell me no lies is now 32.5k long, and I am slowly imposing structure upon the mad tangle of scenes that I’ve written. Only 17,438 words to go!
Diagnosing the plot problem that has plagued Path to the Peacock Throne for the better part of two months. The solution, however, means that the story is going to be a two-parter, but for the saga and adventure that I have in mind, I’ll need two books to tell Liandre’s tale. It’s a lofty goal, but one that I can’t wait to tackle. This might just be one of my Round 4 goals. 😀
Overhauling the “Novels In-Progress” page on the blog and adding new synopses for the three stories that I’m juggling. This has been a goal for a while now.
Following the #ASA2011 twitter feed for the annual American Sociological Association meeting, currently happening in Las Vegas. The venue of course means that there are many pithy observations about consumption and commodities, along with highlights from the sessions. Someone has also gone and made twitter accounts for social theorists Emile Durkheim (@emiledurkheim) and Talcott Parsons (@talcottparsons), which are hilarious, and filled with lots of nerdy soc jokes. For example:

Finally, I read a book! This has been on my to-do list for a few weeks now. I devoured Elizabeth Redfern’s Music of the Spheres, which is a murder mystery that takes place in 18th century London. It actually reminds me a fair bit of what I’m trying to do with tell me no lies, so it was both entertaining and useful.

Today is a hard-core work day, so I’m off to make some headway on the thesis, and hopefully add another 1600 words or so to my WIP. Have a wonderful week, all!

ROW80 Check-in: Playing Catch-Up

August 17, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 16 Comments

Late Sunday night, I made the last-minute decision to enter the SheWrites “We Love New Novelists” contest. The contest was advertised as a way for five un-agented novelists to “sail to the top of the slush pile” and have their work read by a panel of editors and agents.

I heard about the contest a couple of days beforehand, and initially decided not to enter. It required a 2000 word excerpt, preferably from the first chapter, and the opening scenes of tell me no lies was riddled with holes, not to mention over 4000 words long (I was planning on saving the intro for last so, hence the messy state of affairs). The contest also asked for a cover letter with author bio and synopsis, and that felt like too much work as well.

It hit me, though, somewhere in the small hours of Monday morning that not submitting was a silly idea, and so I dropped everything for two days to rewrite, edit and polish things up. I ended up scrapping the original opening scene of the story and redoing it, deleting passages that I loved but no longer fit (ack, sacrificing the babies is such a hard job), and killing off adverbs and dialogue tags and all of those other things.

The resulting entry is 1976 words long, and after reading it aloud a few times last night, I rather love it. It’s not perfect, but I’m proud of it and that’s what matters.

I also managed to cobble together a cover letter, which made me want to scream and throw things and pull out my hair in frustration. When it came to dealing with the synopsis, I utilized Stacy Green’s latest post on writing a synopsis and Roni Loren’s 5 tips for writing a synopsis. I also drew on Jami Gold’s recent post on writing an author bio (it literally popped up on tweetdeck as I was trying to write my bio. Serendipitous!) and Nathan Bransford’s series on writing query letters. I’m so grateful that there are so many resources out there on the web, otherwise I would’ve been totally lost.

I’m a couple of days behind on NaNo, so hopefully I can make up the 3000 words or so that I’m behind. And I really need to buckle down on my thesis and a few other responsibilities that I’ve left languishing on my to-do list, so for the rest of the week I will be playing catch-up.

Hope everyone’s doing well this week! I totally fell by the wayside and didn’t visit any blogs on Sunday, so I’m going to try to make up for it this afternoon.

ROW80 Check-in: Exploring “Hell’s Half-Acre”

August 14, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 31 Comments

Summer marches on, and now that grading is through, life is calming down a bit. I spend my days writing and dealing with the family, and by the time I fall into bed, I’m usually exhausted. But I’ve reached 21k on tell me no lies, I’ve outlined and organized the next chapter of my thesis, and I’ve managed to spend time with friends and family, so I think I’ve been fairly successful in terms of progress. However, I’m starting to feel like I’m spending way too much time on the computer, so I’m going to have to unplug sometime soon and just read a book.

A sketch of Barbary Coast, circa 1889

I took a little time out yesterday to return to the San Francisco Chronicle‘s digital archives and poke around a bit. In my last round of research I spent time poring over crime reports, but this time I did a search for any mention of the Barbary Coast, and whoa. I was worried that my depiction of the Barbary Coast was too dark, but after reading these articles, I’m actually wondering if it’s dark enough.

A sketch of "Cutthroat Alley," circa 1889

By the late 1880s, the Barbary Coast was reportedly much calmer than during the wild west days of yore. Still, judging from these articles, conditions were still deplorable. Vice, murder, theft, drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, suicide, child abuse… all of these were commonplace in “Hell’s Half-Acre.” Men were violent, women were loose, brassy and bold. It’s easy to imagine a serial killer at work in these parts, preying on ladies of the stage. Better yet, my MC, Tempest Dumont, would have totally fit in with her swearing, boozing, flirting ways.

One of the "battle-axes" of the Barbary Coast

This passage from an 1889 article, “Hell’s Half-Acre: Sights and Scenes on the Barbary Coast,” totally sums up the vibe that I’ve been going for in my WIP:

Entering a saloon on Kearny street near Jackson, on the east side, there were found about half a dozen horribly dissipated looking hags seated at tables with men of the same general appearance of themselves. Gin, rum, and bad beer had painted all of their faces of a lurid hue, the faithful reflex of evil passions within. “These,” said the guide, as he pointed to the women, “are the ‘battle-axes’ or ‘blisters’ of Barbary. They live on drink, you may say, and spend about half their time in jail.”

The scene actually reminds me of Roarke’s, the local bar where my characters hang out. It’s a rundown, ramshackle dive where the company is questionable and the only beer on tap is little better than bitter swill, much different from the glitz and glamor of the Belladonna, the saloon where Tempest works.

I’ll be writing more about setting and the Barbary Coast in the weeks to come, and hopefully I’ll get a chance to check out the Barbary Coast walking tour before I head back to Santa Barbara.

ROW80: Still on Track!

August 10, 2011 / Lena Corazon / 24 Comments

Not too much to report for this mid-week ROW80 check-in. Blogwise, I’ve been keeping up with my theme days — I wrote a steampunk fashion post on Monday and a fun music post yesterday — and I’ve got drafts of the remaining two posts for the week queued up.

In the realm of writing, tell me no lies is coming along. I’ve been tweaking the plot, and taking time to work out the kinks and details for the latter half of the story. My MC now has a fleshed-out backstory that is much more, and I have a better idea of what the climax will look like. Better yet, my antagonist, a sociopathic serial killer, is sending very creepy letters to my MC (creepy to the point where I am getting the heebie-jeebies). The story has reached 16k, which means that I have another 34k to write in order to ‘win’ CampNaNo. Shockingly, this doesn’t seem too far out of reach, so maybe, just maybe, I’ll have a working draft of this novel by the end of the month. *crosses fingers and looks hopeful*

If I can maintain the pace of writing roughly 1500 words per day, I might consider giving my other two WIPs the NaNo treatment, focusing solely on one for a month or so, hammering out as many words as possible, and then setting it aside to move on to the next tale. I am almost certain that I am going to attempt NaNo in November, and if I indeed do so, I am going to take the month to edit and finish Path to the Peacock Throne. I’ve had glimmers of ideas for the latter two-thirds of the book, and I think by the time November rolls around, I’ll be more than ready to get back to my world of magic and legend and lore.

The other thing I’ve been doing this week is playing around with flash fiction. Up till this point, I’ve avoided it like the plague, mostly because I tend to be quite a wordy sort of writer. I like detail and backstory and description, and the thought of having to cram all that into a teeny tale was more than I could bear. But I figured I’d try out a challenge involving the seven heavenly virtues, and surprisingly, I’m having a blast. I’ve covered the first four — Chastity, Temperance, Charity, and Diligence — and I have some ideas simmering in my head for the final three. At 100 words each they are a bit of a challenge to write, but oh my, I’m having fun doing it.

-oOo-

And now for a cool historical tidbit! For this check-in, I offer a collection of pretty pictures, courtesy of the Library of Congress’ Photocrom Print Collection. This collection showcases travel photographs taken around the world between 1890s and 1910s, and are all in color. I highly recommend checking it out, as the photos are all incredibly gorgeous.

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Lena Corazon

Flights of Fancy