by Sam on December 1, 2010
My first published short story has now made its way online, and can be found in the Winter 2010 issue of The Battered Suitcase. The story is called “No More Butterflies”, it was partly inspired by my love of suspenseful Hitchcock movies, partly inspired by strange coincidences experienced on my way to work, and the rest conjured up in my overactive imagination :)
Click here to check it out – and I’m eager to hear your feedback in the comments below, via Twitter, or any other means :)
by Sam on December 1, 2010
As you can see from the graph above, there’s a slight disparity between what I had to do to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November, and what I actually managed to achieve…
I hadn’t really been planning to enter NaNoWriMo ahead of time, but I just so happened to finish the outline of my first novel around the end of October, so I thought: why not give it a try? It could make things a bit more fun and give me a boost, tapping into the extra motivation to get the novel off to a good start.
The idea of NaNo is to forget about all the usual anxieties of whether what you’re writing is actually any good or not, and just focus on getting words down on the page. Quantity over quality is the name of the game, but… well, I kind of chose to ignore that part. A few times I found myself getting stuck, or not being entirely happy with a section, and thinking I could just leave it to come back to and fix later. But that’s just not my way of doing things. The more scrutiny you pay in the outlining stage, the easier your life becomes in the writing stage. And the more scrutiny you pay in the writing stage, the easier your life becomes in the editing stage. And I really don’t enjoy the editing stage! So anything I can do to make that part easier I’m definitely going to do.
Although I didn’t get anywhere near the 50,000 words needed to complete NaNo, I still probably wrote a lot more than I would have done if I hadn’t entered it. I beat my previous monthly record of about 8,500 words, coming in at 13,000 words in total for the month of November. And I am, so far, quite happy with what I have written. I will miss putting my wordcount in the NaNoWriMo box each day and seeing the pretty graph update – that was a good motivational tool in itself. But maybe I can find something else like that, which I can use all the year round.
So, I may have completely failed at NaNoWriMo, but I don’t think NaNoWriMo has completely failed me. Now to finish the novel, edit it (sigh), and then begin the not-at-all-daunting process of trying to get it published (eek!).
by Sam on October 30, 2010
Who am I?
S. J. Webb (full name Samuel Jonathan Webb – Sam for short), a 29-year-old web developer, from a tiny little village in Leicestershire, England.
What am I doing here?
Trying to write fiction, and hoping I can do it well :)
And why?
I can remember trying to start a story-writing club when I was about eight years old; getting told off repeatedly, around the same age, by a certain teacher at school, for daydreaming; staying in the classroom at lunch time, when I was about ten, writing stories with my best friend (something about people standing on clouds is all I can remember); writing various stories throughout secondary school, most of which were well received, apart from one slightly self-indulgent horror story (something about an alien axe murderer, whose Achilles heel turned out to be water); writing and editing stories for various ezines in my late teens; in my early twenties, writing the storyline for a videogame (which never quite made its way to becoming an actual finished game); and then… some how or other, I must have got distracted from all this story-writing. I don’t think I had the time any more for writing or for reading, and forgot how much I loved doing both.
What brought it all flooding back?
Fight Club. I met this guy in a bar who asked me to hit him as hard as I could. Or, well, I saw a movie in which that happened. And my mind was blown. I didn’t know a movie could have such an effect on a person. I started reading Chuck Palahniuk‘s other books, and it wasn’t long before I re-realised that writing was what I really wanted to do.
And then I wrote a book and it sold billions?
Erm… not yet. But I have spent a great deal of time reading, and studying, and teaching myself how to write better fiction. I have written a number of short stories, the first of which is due to be published in December. And I have begun the process of writing my first novel.
Am I going to stop talking to myself now?
Yes! Please subscribe to my blog, post me nice comments, tweet me some tweets, and put me out of my misery :) And I hope you will read some of my stories when I get them online :)
