Category: Words

The Villains Guide to Winning #NaNoWriMo Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

Ron Delaney Jr1 Comment

Welcome home, villains!

So the silly season is once again upon us, that time of year where all sanity and reason abandon those writers possessed of the notion that committing fifty-thousand words in a single month is a good idea. What folly, to bleed upon their keyboards through November, as if their souls ache for torture like that willfully sought by those sinners hurling themselves into Dante’s sixth circle of Hell, intent on the corruption of that sacred process of creation known as writing.

But if ya gotta, ya gotta, I guess.

Last year, I wrote a piece offering suggestions on how one might make novelist torture porn National Novel Writing Month easier on themselves. If you didn’t read that post, the villainous premise is simple enough:

#NaNoWriMo is not about writing a good book, it’s about getting 50K words into your document. Winning is all that matters, and you do that not by being a good, honest writer, but by hitting your daily word count, plain and simple.

I shared some villainous tips (as in things other suckers writers won’t think “honest” or “scrupulous” or “fair”) on how to get your daily word count swole, but surely you didn’t think I gave away all the dark secrets in that single post, did you? If so, surprise, fools! Here are some additional rules for cheating winning NaNoWriMo.

Embrace the dark side, kids. We have better toys.

Continue reading “The Villains Guide to Winning #NaNoWriMo Part 2: Electric Boogaloo” →

Friday Morning FYI – 9/9/2016

Ron Delaney Jr2 Comments

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI (busy busy busy weekend edition) – my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

On Saturday, I received a rejection for a short story that went far into the selection process, and of which I’m quite proud. Not the biggest deal in the world as it was my first short story submission ever, and I figure I get to keep all the fun characters and use them in more stories (stay tuned), but for writers any rejection can be very disheartening.

Jump to Sunday where I spent six hours in yoga trainer training (no, not for research). In the late session, we were shown Crow, but before trying it, the trainer showed us how to roll in case we found ourselves falling forward. He went into the posture, tucked his head, leaned forward, rolled, and wound up in a sitting position. “Just roll,” he said to a room full of people who had obviously never (or not recently) done that, and shrugged. “That’s it, just roll.” As ideas/realizations normally do, ‘Just roll’ struck me like a bee sting, because that’s what I do with my writing rejections. That leads us to this week’s FYI :

Every rejection, in writing and in life, can feel like a knife to the gut, but they’re not. They’re part of the learning/growing process, like all failures. Understand and accept that not everyone will love or even like everything you write, and that’s normal. Keep going until you find the right words for the right story for the right audience. Until then, just roll.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 9/2/2016

Ron Delaney Jr1 Comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI (yes, late again edition) – my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

A lot happened this weekend: several peaks, and a single valley of my own carving. That has me tempted to be grotesquely self-indulgent in this FYI, but I’ll spare everyone and instead go with mildly self-indulgent:

Hey guys, I finished the 1st draft of my new book.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 6/3/2016

Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI – my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

I’m writing this to you from my favorite coffee shop, on a morning where I had day job work to do, to shop for some fishing tackle (rw shopping, not interwebz shopping), and to pack for a weekend camping trip. Why am I mentioning this? Because I got the work and packing done before 9AM, came to the coffee shop to write, and will go buy my tackle in a few minutes. In fact I’m only taking the time to write this post because I’m done writing for today (seven hundred words to finish a chapter). Nuts? Not at all. That’s this week’s FYI:

JK Rowling said, “Be ruthless about protecting your writing days…” I all too often hear writers complain about having “… just too much else to do.” Bull. There’s a lot of hours in the day. I know writers who get words down at 5AM. Get up earlier, have some coffee and breakfast, and get typing.

Or do you presume to tell JK she’s wrong?

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Sexy

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I was thinking about being in the woods and camp fires and the way people use sexy to mean attractive in some way, and this little run-on sentence crawled around in my ear until I wrote it down. I liked the rhythm in it, so decided an impromptu post was in order.

I think you’re sexy but not in an I want to have sex with you way, in a way that if I was sitting around a campfire with my friends and you came out of the woods and asked if we had any tea I’d say “Sure, little tree, join our circle,” and we’d all talk until we fell asleep under the stars and the next morning I’d wake up and you’d be gone and that would be OK.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}