Category: Friday’s Findings
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Friday’s Findings: The StoryGraph
For years, I’ve used Goodreads and LibraryThing to keep track of my reading. I also use them to see reviews of books, get reading ideas, and promote my own novels. Yesterday, my coworker introduced my to StoryGraph. It’s similar to the other book reading websites, but StoryGraph has an emphasis on statistics. It breaks down…
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Friday’s Findings: The Scratchpad Method
Today is the first day of Camp NaNoWriMo–it’s my first Camp NaNoWriMo!– and I’m using something called “The Scratchpad Method.” You see, I have a writing situation. Is it a good or bad situation? It’s good in the sense I have an abundance of WIPs to work on. It’s bad in the sense I don’t…
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Friday’s Findings: Scene Revision
Writing scenes is one of my favorite parts of fiction writing. I watched a great video on scene revision and learned a lot: Revise Your NaNoWriMo Novel with Writing Mastery Academy & Fictionary In this video, author Jessica Brody talks about three checkpoints to review a scene with to improve it. She has even more…
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Friday’s Findings: Fictionary
I bit the bullet and purchased a subscription to Fictionary. Being a word-processing program and outliner for authors, it falls into the same category as Scrivener, but they have some differences. Here’s how I feel about Fictionary: Character tracking: Fictionary has a great feature for keeping track of characters in each scene. Character tracking is…
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What a Mess!
After thirty days of writing over fifty thousand words, what do I have to show? An incoherent mess of scraps of conversations, descriptions and exposition. It’s a mess. And that’s what makes my 2021 NaNoWriMo a success. The story is there, told all the way through. I just have to rework it and rework it.…
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Friday’s Findings: The Story on Two Levels
I believe I’ve quoted this fiction writing axiom before, but Terry Pratchett said, “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” With this year’s NaNoWriMo, I’m finding out how true this is. I’m feeling exactly what he was talking about. I spent September and October prepping my story. I made up characters. I…
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Friday’s Findings: Writers Retreat
This weekend, I’m having a writer’s retreat. I’m the only one attending. Two of my friends are going on their 2nd honeymoon and asked me if I’d like to watch their cat and their awesome house. How is it awesome? First of all, it’s gorgeous. Secondly, it’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by forest…
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Friday’s Findings
I’m trying something new this year for NaNoWriMo. I’m jumping around. Not up and down in my chair, but around the manuscript. Usually, I write in a linear fashion. I start at the beginning and write the scenes in order. This year I’ve decided to skip around my WIP. Why am I trying this? The…
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Friday’s Findings
My first week of NaNoWriMo 2021 has gone fantastic. It’s day four and I’m already past 10,000 words. I’ve had some years of NaNo in which I just wasn’t into it, but this year I’m on fire. I think it’s because I did some planning. I created an outline with a summary of scenes, and…
Andrew M. Friday 