Changing POV...

Seems my mystery novel wants to be written in first person. It's been nagging me for a while but I'd been ignoring it. I mean, I already have a good start with it in third person. But the other night I finally gave in and seriously pondered the change.

My writing mentor, if I'd asked her, would say to write some in first person and see which way worked best. So I took her advice and gave first person a try. I figured I could do the "First 500" in first and not lose much if I didn't like it.

The only problem…I didn't have a good opening line. I wasn't happy with the third person opening either but just didn't have a clue how to fix it. However, once I made the commitment to give first a try, a really nice first line arrived.

Now I'm almost 2k into my rewrite, changing from third to first person. I'm really pleased with the way things are flowing and how much more the character comes through. I figure by the end of the day, I'll have caught up to the 4k mark on the counter to the right. Which will be very cool.

So, what's your favorite POV to write in and why?

First 500

I'm a procrastinator. In fact, if they gave awards for procrastination, I've have at least one of each award. But I've decided to tackle this issue in order to get more writing done. So, I decided to put myself on an internet diet. No internet until the "First 500" are written.

I started this on Monday of last week and I have to say, it's worked quite well. I've managed to get over 500 words each day, two days I got close to 1,000 and one day I got over 1,300. And only one day were the words so bad I deleted them later. Even though they were dreck, they did give me some ideas and got me started on the right direction. So, when I wrote the new scene the next day, it was very nice.

I did take the weekend off and spend it doing stuff with family and of course, church on Sunday but I did do a bit of planning so I'd have a starting point this week.

This week, I'm aiming for 1,000 words each morning before going to the internet. Seems doable and I seriously need to make progress on this novel. May will be here before long and I have to be ready.

I've also decided to focus solely on novel. No more prompts for fun. I won't promise no more short stories since when the plot bunny drops off an idea, you don't want to insult them by being ungrateful but I'm going to try to stay on track.

And so…if you need to get things written, try the "First 500" idea. Put your writing before whatever it is that distracts you and get those words on paper. Believe me, it's worth it and gets easier each day.

I'm back...

Finally…a new blog post.

It’s been a while since I updated but that’s mostly because of puter problems and having to buy a new puter. I now have a very nice laptop I call “The Precious.” I tell the kids it’s because “I needz it.”

Then, I was trying to catch up on things and get back into writing and blogging just didn’t take top billing. I’ve thought about it numerous times but never seemed to get around to it.

One thing I learned from the past two months with all the puter issues is to back up EVERTHING!!! I’ve been pretty obsessive about backing up the writing since I lost some and had to start over but this past May, I learned the value of backing up other things as well.

Such as…your favorites list. I didn’t and now I can’t find one of my favorite name sites. I’ve asked other writing friends I might have shared it with, googled every combination of key words I can think off and even did the new “bing” thing. I can’t find it. Most of my favorites weren’t a big deal or were things I could refind easily. Don’t lose something special.

Misc. software… A while back, Give Away of the Day had Liquid Story Binder as their give away. And I really liked it for keeping things organized. And while I always backed up things I added to LSB, I never made a second copy of the program. Now, I’m back to waiting for them to offer it again. I hope soon.

Also…I managed to get the printer driver from the manufacturer’s website but the OCR software was lost. So, while I can use the printer, I can’t scan anything in and convert it to a Word doc. Sigh.

I plan to do better this time around.

This past week, a good friend of mine lost about 28k of her novel when her puter decided to eat it. The only thing we can figure is somehow she hit one of the “F” keys and it deleted the whole document as she was typing. She didn’t have a second copy of it anywhere and they couldn’t find it. Now she’s got to start over. She had sent me the first 5 pages so I returned them and she had a beginning but all that work, gone.

So, I’ve declared Wednesday each week as Back Up Your WIP Day. I’ll try to remind you each week.