Wednesday, May 30, 2012

First Chapter Done!

So, it's been a while since I blogged, but I finally have a real, tangible bench mark hit. I finished the first chapter! I was so excited that I have kind of slacked off since starting the second chapter, but hope to get some work done on it this week.

Total Word Count: 3143

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Writing has been happening

So I have been writing some lately, but mostly in my journals so it's harder to keep a word count going. I have gotten a little more into the computer though so I have made some progress there as well. I have also hit the point where I need to do a little research, so I've been spending my spare time reading up. I'm hoping to take this week to get all of my journal writing into the computer so I can have a more accurate (and much higher, thus happier) word count. So I will get off here and get back to it.

Current Word Count: 2519

Monday, April 30, 2012

Finally started working on the novel again

OK, so it's not 3 times a week, but it's waay sooner than normal so it's an improvement. Plus the biggest news is that I have actually started working on my novel again. I enjoy working on it once I get started, it's the getting started that is hard. I'm also enjoying taking the several starts and offshoots I have worked on and bringing them to one cohesive story. I will update again once I'm a little further. In the meantime I will start posting weekly word counts to encourage me to keep going. :)

Word Count: 1,139

Sunday, April 22, 2012

So let's try this again...

Obviously I am a terrible blogger. Wedding and holidays finally aside. I'm hoping to start back up on transferring more of my book from paper to computer tonight. Hopefully :) I'll post another update tonight on my progress.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Blogging Fail

Apparently I am a once a month kind of blogger. I finally uploaded my art from my 30 day art challenge. You can check it out at www.flickr.com/zoiesmurf. I have both this year and last year's art up.

I didn't end up finishing this year's NaNoWriMo, but I did make some headway on the novel. Hopefully once the wedding and holiday season are past I'll be able to get farther. Wedding planning for the middle of the holiday season was not smart, but only one more week to go!

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and a fantastic New Year.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Art and Novel Writing

Apparently I am a terrible blogger as it has officially taken me weeks to update this...

I recently completed the 30 day art challenge and will hopefully get around to uploading the pictures soon... I decided to do mostly photography this year. It was a lot of fun, and I got some really cool shots. It was almost more fun though to see the photos afterwards and get to play with them with a photo editor.

I have discovered there is a big difference in the photo paper you buy to print your own photos at home. I started out with matte photo paper, which is basically like construction paper for printing photos. Unfortunately most of the photos I tried to print on that came out streaky, so I quickly gave in and found other paper. I tried buying Target brand photo paper, which served it's purpose. The photos printed on it and most didn't streak. When I ran out of that I bought some Kodak photo paper, and it is by far the best quality of any of the options I've tried. The photos printed, none with streaks, and all with much better color quality than the Target brand paper. /end photo paper rant

I decided to try NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year, knowing full well that I probably wouldn't finish, but thinking it would help jumpstart my novel writing. Deciding to give it a try the month before my wedding was probably a bad idea, but oh well. Now that I know about it, I will make it my goal to try to participate in it every year. So far I have just under 1,100 words consecutively in one document with many more in journals that I need to transcribe to a document that will count them for me.

So far I have been using Word to write with, but am looking into getting Scrivner as I've been told it's much better for this kind of writing. I'll post an update once I've had time to play around with it.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Writing Workshop

This is my first blog since LiveJournal was big for teenagers probably 10 years ago, so we'll see how it goes. My name is Brittny. I have a wonderful fiance/soon to be husband Neal and an awesome cat named Meeko. I love reading, doing art, and am hoping to finally make progress writing my first novel. When I want to be active I do yoga, pilates, TaeKwonDo, or snowboard.

Yesterday I attended a writing workshop from Clarion West called Jump Start Your Novel. The speaker was Mark Teppo. I'm going to have to go out and buy his book now. :) He was super helpful as a speaker and had a lot of great ideas for how to do a general outline, how to structure a book and tips for things to do if you are feeling stuck. Hopefully now I will finally be able to get this novel from my head to paper. I find I have ideas, but I get too caught up in trying to edit when I should just be writing and letting it flow. I'm going to try to set aside time daily or every other day to try to get further into the writing.

I will probably also post about my art here. This will be my second year doing an art challenge. The challenge is to do 30 pieces of art in 30 days. You get 30 - 8x10in canvases and can use any medium you want as long as it does not extend off the canvas. Last year I did paintings, but I think this year I will do mostly photography. I just got my film back, so now it's time to get started. :)

~Brittny