#writefest

[fachefaucheux]

WriteFest! // Day 1 + Goals

It’s that magical time of year again! You know, the one where amateur writers all across the internet take on stupidly ambitious word count goals and drive themselves batty trying to reach them. I am no exception.

I’ve been doing word count goal challenges during the last two months of the year off and on since 2001 (really dating myself here, eh?). And despite all the terrible business that’s been going on with the most infamous one, I’m not going to quit a two-decade long habit just because other people are asshats. 

The OG Word Count Challenge helped me write my first “novel” Way Back In the Day, actually. That story was a bizarre fever dream about a guy who found a nuclear warhead in the supply closet of the care home he was working in…and getting rid of it required him to go undercover as vicar and infiltrate MI6??? Obviously, that didn’t end up going anywhere. But you can see glimmers of the same tried-and-true plot devices in it that I’ve been using ever since: a mix of action and humor, the fantastic and bizarre, shady con men pretending to be religious authority figures. (I don’t know why fake priests seem to be a running theme across my stories. I blame Catholic grade school and an overactive imagination.)

Since I tend to favor quantity over quality, I’ve escalated over the years to usually setting my word count goal for November at the 100k mark. But this year, I’ve been confronted with a challenge too insane for me to resist! I do a lot of my drafting on a website called 4thewords that I discovered nearly two years ago (great site, tbh, I highly recommend it to anyone who is more productive when they gamify their life), and this year, they’ve raised the challenge bar to a whole other level. For this year’s WriteFest, the top goal is to write 250k in 44 days. That’s roughly 5,700 words a day, for those of you who don’t feel like whipping out your calculator app.

So, of course, I had to do it.

Is this a good idea? Probably not. Am I still going to try my hardest? You’re goddamn right.

But I am cheating juuuuuust a little. I’m not doing it all on one WIP. This year, I’ll be working on completing Mushroom Picking Season (maybe 20k left? hopefully), the first volume of Canticle (if there’s more than 200k left on that, I’m totally cooked), and making a pitiful attempt at pushing my dissertation to the 25k mark, which is about halfway. (Yes! I do stuff other than write gay shit! My dissertation contains no gay lunatics, sadly. But it does contain an overabundance of (yugo)slavs.) Tally all those up, and you’ve got the 250k, with some wiggle room for just writing some unhinged smut to pad the total when I’m too tired to write anything semi-coherent.

As tradition dictates, I started on November 1st. Not at midnight, because I’m old and decrepit. But at six in the morning. And the results are in!

Day one, done and dusted. Total words: 8,226. For a brief moment, I’m ahead! Only 241,774 to go!

Of course, it’s the second now that I’m posting this. Once again, at six in the morning. I think I’ll try to snag another couple hours of rest before charging into the breach once more. Today’s goal is at least 6,000 words. But probably more, since I owe ya’ll an installment of Niv/Yule hijinks on Sunday. If I get really ahead this weekend, maybe I can even take a very small breather sometime this coming week. (I’m going to need it. For Reasons.)

Stay tuned to see how fast this project goes off the rails! (And snag a sneak peak at some writing snippets, if I’m feeling ambitious.)

[noellelefey]

NaNoWriMo Alternatives

Considering NaNoWriMo has imploded, I took the liberty of compiling a bunch of alternatives. While I haven't personally vetted these, just thought they might be worth looking into.

#ZapWhamPow https://bookishchallenge.forumotion.com/

Heart Breathings Rough Draft Challenge https://youtu.be/o1TMKLzbYvU?si=RCyMdecCVxoBN4aN

Rough Draft Month When?: Nov 1st (30 days) https://www.instagram.com/roughdraftmonth/

4theWords Write Fest When?: October 28 - December 10, 2024 https://4thewords.com/writefest

Pathfinders Writing Collective Challenge When?: Starts Nov 1st - you can choose for how long https://www.instagram.com/p/C_nyqGzOu39/?img_index=1

Camp Sword When?: Oct 1st https://x.com/ss_scribbles/status/1836720548677574893?s=46&t=DBdn4Gw7LFosy7AtbwvoAA

First Draft Fall When?: Oct - planning, Nov - writing, Dec - wrapping up https://weeknightwriters.com/2024/09/12/announcing-firstdraftfall/

Winter Writing Challenge When?: Nov 1st - Jan 1st https://www.tumblr.com/lavendershowcase/760999178527703040/the-queer-winter-writing-challenge?source=share

Novel Gauntlet Challenge When?: Nov 1st (30 days) https://bsky.app/profile/novelgauntlet.bsky.social

Rogue’s Amazing Word Rush When?: Oct 1st - Nov 30th https://roguewriters.net

last updated: oct 27, 2024

[blissfulalchemist]

Okay I have some decent size pieces from ffxiv writefest that I could post for wip but how many do you all want to see snippets from? There’s 10 good sized ones to pick from. And let me know in the tags or replies if you wanna see a specific oc I may have.

[k4saneterritory]

imagine writing 

[badseedaddict]

Sensitivity Reader panel #writefest #houstonwritersguild (at Winter Street Studios)

[abatkatblogging]

Some new plot diagrams to add to my collection, courtesy of @leichtstina30fc and #writefest

[dear-indie-texas]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Texas Authors (@txauthors)

Award winning #Author & #Speaker B Alan Bourgeois at #WriteFest 18 in Houston TX. http://WriteFestHouston.com

[jakegyllenhaalsupportgroup]

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️writefest❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

AHHH I’M SO GLAD YOU GUYS ARE ALL SO DOWN FOR THIS

Check out the Write Fest plan!!

[michaelrunderwood]

Writefest Schedule!

I’m appearing virtually on panels for this year’s Writefest, a multi-genre conference run by Writespace. Find out how to register here. You can see me on panels across the weekend: Saturday April 30th9am EDT Podcasting: How Audio Can Grow Your Writing Career Michael R. Underwood • Marshall Ryan Maresca • Meg Hafdal • Michael DeLuca 1pm EDTThe Query Letter: How to Land an Agent Michael R.…

[grammarlyapp]

Tales of history and true romance

Rob died last year and her motivation led her to WriteFest's memoir-writing ... FOR US: Evie Rae is determined to finish writing her husband Rob's ... http://ift.tt/2yD246X

[fachefaucheux]

WriteFest! // Days 4-14 + Genre Musings and Inat

So, I’m behind.

As of this morning, I’m at 45k. Which is great! Awesome! That is objectively an asston of words. Probably half a novel, if I was a normal person who wrote normal word count stories. Unfortunately, I’m supposed to be closing in on 75k. So…not great. But seeing as how we’ve all been living through A Hell Of A Time, especially last week, I’m not going to beat myself up over it too much. I’ve only had one day where I skipped writing entirely. (At least in terms of drafting…I did edit a full chapter that day, which is probably why I wrote nothing, because editing is the absolute worst.) And one day off over 2 weeks is…uh, hopefully not our future vision of a leisurely and unproductive pace, lol.

One thing I’ve noticed about myself as a writer is that I’m pretty damn inconsistent. Or, well, not just as a writer, but just on the whole. I’ve never been the kind of person who can stick to a “do something every day at the same time for the same amount of time” scheme. Of course, I have some sort of routine — humans are creatures of habit, we all fall into some kind of pattern. Mine is just very “vibes based”, so to speak. Some days, I’ll fall into the writing zone and barf up 10k worth of nonsense. Other days, I’m feeling the research side of things, or just feel like reading someone else’s work to get a fresh perspective. (I am never vibing with editing. Editing is always torture. But that’s for another post.)

I’ve never been able to follow a rulebook. I am a hopeless contrarian, oftentimes to my own detriment. In Serbia, there’s a sort of…hmm, cultural mindset, maybe? It’s called inat. Sometimes it gets translated as spitefulness, other times as stubbornness or perseverance. 

Your friends, your family, everyone tells you that doing something is a bad idea. But now you want to do it even more than when you asked for their advice, because what do they know? That’s inat. Some judgmental person tells you you’ll never be good at something, so then you throw out everything else in your life and grind at that one thing until you’re objectively skilled, just because that asshole told you you’d never make it. That’s also inat. It’s that “fuck you, I’ll do what I want” spirit, sometimes taken to unhelpful ends.

My Serbian language teacher once asked me why I was keeping my watchband held together with a band-aid instead of going to the shop she’d recommended to get a replacement, and I shrugged and said, “well, you know, I’ve been busy lately.” She smiled and shook her finger at me and said, “I see, you’re becoming a real Serbian now. Soon you’ll be skipping your lessons and telling me “the only thing I have to do in life is die!”

To be frank, she called my bluff pretty well. And maybe that’s why I didn’t have too many problems adjusting during my year in Belgrade. Because I’d been following inat long before I acquired my weird fixation on the Balkans.

This leads me to the genre problem.

I’ve always come at genre from the perspective that it exists more for the reader than the writer — a way of lumping together vaguely similar story elements and types so that readers can find the kinds of books they want to read. And I’m well aware of its connection to marketing, as much as I despise marketing with every fiber of my being. You drill down to the exact core of readers who you want to enjoy your book, you write for them, then you sell it to them. Or something. Like I said, I hate marketing, so I haven’t invested much time into it. (Probably because someone once told me it was important, and I was like, fuck you! I’ll ignore it. Inat in action.)

I wandered into both Canticle and the Niv/Yule story arc (which I really need to find a proper title for, instead of just shamelessly stealing a bunch of song titles and lyrics…) not from the perspective of “I want to write x genre of story”, but more from the perspective of “these two idiots would make for a fun couple, I wonder how they get from point A to point B?”. Most of the other elements — magic, angels/demons, whatever my passing historical fixation was at the time — came along for the ride because I just thought they were neat and fun. Which makes for an interesting story (or so I’ve been told), but not one that fits into the best genre boxes.

Take Canticle, for example. It’s really in some sort of genre black hole. There’s not enough historical immersion for it to be a true historical story, but at the same time, historical circumstance (the aftermath of the English Civil War, Louis XIV’s court, modernizing Europe) plays a big role in the themes and attitudes in it. It’s got some of the elements of your usual epic fantasy — empires and kingdoms and armies and the world in peril — but, uh, it’s not very action-forward, seeing as how most of what the reader sees are not the battles themselves but the aftermath in the infirmary. 

Even when it comes to romance, it’s not quite there. I’ve always thought of it as a romance at its core, because my only driving force when I first started drafting it was answering the question of “how did Gen and Mirk get together?”, but it doesn’t really follow the standard romance plot beats. The uncomfortable position I usually find myself in when discussing the story with other writers or workshopping chapters is that it doesn’t have enough romance for the romantasy readers/writers, and not enough fantasy action/too much relationship nonsense for the general fantasy readers/writers.

So, what am I supposed to do with it when it does come time to do the dreaded marketing? Or the even more dreaded editing? I suppose I could cut and edit to make it fit neater into one or two specific genre boxes, but, well. I feel that would kill the spirit of the story that the small band of readers (for whom I am eternally grateful) seems to find appealing. At the end of the day, I’m probably going to bank more on trope-based tagging and advertising guiding the sort of readers who’d appreciate it to the story. (Also, inat. You want me to make this fit into your genre requirements? Fuck you! I do what I want! Even if it means no one reads the damn thing!)

It’s hard for me to identify the genre of the story, but the dynamics are clear. The slow burn, it is glacial. The grumpy x sunshine is on point. And hurt/comfort? You want that? Canticle has it for…uh…centuries, lol. And, to be honest, I tend to look for dynamics/tropes in the books I read more than I do genre. I’ll read a contemporary or a sci-fi or a western, anything to get another dose of that black cat x golden retriever dynamic that I find so appealing (and can’t seem to keep out of anything I write). 

Anyway, enough blathering! And back to chipping away at my word count deficit! Since, you know, speaking of black cat x golden retriever…I’ve got another chapter of Mushroom Picking Season to write. 

[atw2006]

4thewords has a free tier now. So if you're interested in gamifying your writing and/or being part of the most fun and accepting group of humans on the planet here is your place.

If you used to love nanowrmo but want to distance yourself because of . . . ofta, this is your place. They've got gamifcaton and goal tracking and no ai stance and a safe community waiting for you. https://4thewords.com/writefest

[ceruleancheckeredcars]

A Lack Of Colour

Prompts: Crystalline, paradox, indubitable, slumber, midnight

  (You’re dozing off; you can feel the blood in your veins slow down. The world swims, hazy. Colours seep out of the walls, swim over your head, into your eyes; everything is turning grey, but you’re gaining colour. You feel better than you have in so long (so, so long; longer than you can even remember.)

Sweet slumber is near (and that makes you feel so good.)

Peter closes his eyes and enjoys his floating bed and the feel of the cool soft pillow beneath his head.

(Hello, darkness (my old friend-

I’ve come to talk with you again)

That’s when he hears the knocking and the sound of his front door as it comes crashing down.

--

The thing about depression is this:

It’s not that you feel sad all the time (you don’t, not really; not unless you sit and think and think and listen to What Sarah Said on repeat.)

It’s the layer of cotton that muffles everything. It’s grey and it covers your eyes, lights are diffused and colours are desaturated, like someone fucked up a simple photoshop job. Sounds seem to be coming from above you, like you’re immersed a bath tub and someone is shouting but sound moves slower in water (it’s denser than air, you see, and waves propagate slower when they move from one medium to another that is denser) and you can sort of hear what they’re shouting but it’s all bubbles (and you don’t care-

It’s the way you can’t seem to care.)

It’s how something that would, should make you smile just flies over your head at fifty miles an hour and you don’t feel-

You-

You’re numb, see.

Numb.

Everything is just numb.

Colours, sounds, feelings (like something is inhibiting your enzymes, cyanide or deadly nightshade or erythromycin- or maybe your enzymes are just denatured.)

--

Peter is floating but someone is shaking him and it’s bringing him back down from his hazy lovely cloud. He opens his eyes, peeps out from behind his eyelashes to see who it is, but they’re behind him and all he sees is drywall which is bleeding cerulean now.

“Peter, Peter, get up.”

“Go away,” he slurs, turning over to the direction of the voice.

The voice is coming from somewhere, far away.

(Further away than usual which is odd, but it doesn’t matter now, nope.)

“Shit. We gotta bring him in, pump his stomach.”

Strong hands on Peter’s waist (where did those come from?) lift him up into a fireman’s carry and Peter can feel his brain sway as he opens his eyes and is greeted by the man’s shoulder (ah, you can feel the pills poke at the top of your stomach, man that tickles-)

“Peter, I’m going to bring you somewhere to get the pills out of you. Hang on tight, okay?”

(- Your mouth tastes sour, you recognise the bile.

Oh god that’s bitter. Ah. Up they come.)

Peter vomits and it makes its way down the man’s back, soiling his clothes. He curses and mumbles under his breath as he makes his way down the stairs, over the broken down door into the street.

--

Sometimes you don’t feel real.

It’s like watching a TV show and projecting yourself into the characters, but never actually experiencing the things they feel, the emotions that play on their faces.

Sometimes you recall memories, memories you don’t remember making. Memories that are clearer than the rest… yet can’t possibly be yours.

Memories of love and family and belonging; a childhood so unlike your own it has to be false, so picturesque it has to be imagined.

Images of playing with a little brown dog called Pat.

Eating dinners that last forever.

Being happy.

--

Peter’s eyelids flutter open. The smells that seep into his nasal cavity remind him distantly of hospitals and infirmaries and dying, dead things- but the crystalline chandelier that glints above him says hotel and wealth and money.

“Where- where am I?” he manages, his mouth feels like cotton and his tongue tastes like bile and cardboard.

(Oh, where are you? What are these things holding you down, why can’t you move?)

“He’s awake,” says someone standing (or sitting, could be either one, you can’t really tell) in the far side of the room.

Peter blinks and turns his head to the direction of the voice. It’s familiar, he thinks abstractly (it’s that voice. The man who broke down your door.) Peter looks at him, takes in the sandy blonde hair and the deep-set grey eyes. He smiles at him, terse, as he holds his walkie talkie close to his face.

Peter looks around, as much as his head will allow. He sees beige walls with plaster moulding lining the perpendicular lines of the walls and the ceiling, a simple wooden chair, a bedside table (that’s what you’re tied to, a bed, really?), a set of dressers and a skinny floor lamp in the corner.

“Good,” says someone else over the static.

“Hello, Peter,” says the man as he walks over to Peter and shines a pen light into his eyes. Peter blinks as the bright lights momentarily flood out all colour and shapes (the way it normally is.)

 “My name is Jack. No, it’s not my real name, but you don’t really need to know that, anyway.”

 “What am I doing here?” Peter asks, refocusing his eyes on the glimmering light fixture hanging over his head. (Your head is spinning, everything hurts, your stomach especially.) He moans and tries to touch his stomach where it hurts the most but his hands come up short because they are tied down, he realises.

“We had to bring you in because you were becoming increasingly unstable. Near midnight, three days ago, you tried to kill yourself, but I think you may remember that. We stuck a long tube down your throat and cleaned out your stomach.” says Jack simply, walking around him and checking his restraints on his arms and around his chest.

Peter is silent; a blurred image of an empty pill bottle comes to mind (oh, right) and he closes his eyes, he remembers the odour of vomit and bleeding colours seeping everywhere. Jack watches him; arms crossed, he sits on the chair; casual, far too easy.

“Why?” he asks, finally.

“Because you cost a lot of money and it would be incredibly annoying if it all went down the drain,” says Jack, checking his watch. “Not to mention it was my shift that you decided to go all ape shit on.”

 “So… so you were watching me?” Peter asks. (Eyes, always watching you. You remember that.)

Jack nods.

--

You try meditation. You try religion. You try new age shamans and finding your inner peace. You try self-help guides and internet aides and twelve step programmes. You get so desperate you try medication.

They say you have severe depression (obviously.) They prescribe pills and treatments-

Nothing works.

You still see grey and you still hear things through a bottle of water. You still feel the eyes on the back of your head, watching, waiting.

Nothing works.

--

“Is he awake?” says the crackle pop voice over the walkie talkie now clipped to Jack’s brown cargo pants. Jack snaps into action, pulls it to his face like a gunslinger drawing a Colt. He glances at Peter, grey eyes sharp behind his blonde eyelashes.

“Yeah,” he replies.

“Good. Let him loose.”

“Okay,” says Jack into the mouthpiece, returning the small grey device back to his hip.

“Who was that?” asks Peter, eyeballing Jack who walks over to his bedside and crosses his arms.

“No one you need to know,” says Jack. “Now, if I take off the restraints will you stay still?”

Peter nods. (What more do you have to lose, anyway?)

Jack loosens one restraint, Peter can feel the blood suddenly rushing into his hands and it prickles at the nerves on the tip of his fingers. He flexes his hand, (damn that feels good) and presses his fingers into the sore spots on his body as Jack removes the other arm restraint and then the one around his chest. He sits up and stretches tensing his muscles like a cat and listening to the satisfying sound of his joints popping. He looks down at his legs and realise they’ve given him stripy compression socks (grey and black strips, how fitting.)

He can see the rest of the room now; he’s lying on a hospital cot, the only piece of furniture that sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the apparently Victorian themed room.

When Jack releases his legs, a thought flashes through Peter’s mind (you should run) but then he remembers Jack’s upper body strength and decides that perhaps running is a bad idea, given that he’s been lying down for three days, anyway.

He swings his legs over the side of the bed and feels the cool floor beneath his bare feet (marble, white, incredibly shiny) and wills himself to not flinch as the feeling in his legs return. He braces himself against the beside table and lifts himself up, tries to stand-

And nearly brings it down with him but then Jack’s there, quick as lightning, holding him up.

“Whoa-“ he says, gripping Peter’s arms tight. “Why don’t we take this slow?”

Peter chuckles.

“Boss coming in now,” says Jack’s hip.

--

Maybe, maybe you’re broken.

Maybe you’re actually a cartoon character caught in the pixels of a tv show, (pixels can’t feel, right?)

Maybe you’re not real; maybe you don’t exist, and if you were too swallow twenty sleeping pills you’d just vanish from memories and thoughts and minds and hearts but matter takes up space and has mass but are you just a weightless ideal?

Pretty soon it becomes an almost indubitable certainty that you don’t actually exist.

Almost.

--

The door creaks open and both of them are caught off guard, but only Peter feels his heart jump out of his throat because the man that walks into the room-

Is him.

Older with slightly shorter greying hair; but still him in every other aspect. Had he been a few years younger and his hair would have been a dark shade of chestnut. His eyes are Peter’s eyes, hazel and intelligent, unblinking as he stares at Peter. He walks with the same gait over to Peter and Jack and eyes him, picking out the birthmark on the inside of his wrist where it’s exposed as he grips onto Jack’s shoulder.

“Peter,” he finally says, addressing the man whose grip is getting tighter and tighter onto his guardian (you’re going to leave bruises there if you keep it up.) His voice deeper and older than Peter’s but the tone and cadence are familiar.

Peter blinks, once, twice.

“My name is Peter. You are me. Sort of,” says the grey-haired man.

(For a moment, you’re stunned. You’re sure this isn’t possible, this has to defy the laws of space and time; a paradox, surely-

That’s when you pass out.)

--

The explanation should be simple, really.

It all boils down to the hunt of eternal youth;

Power, life.

It should be simple, but it’s not.

It never is.

[badseedaddict]

Getting set up for Writefest #writefest #houstonwritersguild (at Writespace)

[abatkatblogging]

Gratuitous Spec Girls selfie. #writefest

[natbrut]

EARLY-BIRD PRICING ENDS TODAY for Writefest Houston! This is your last chance to lock in Writefest’s shockingly low rates at sign up for a 4-day workshop Super Pass, or a Writefest Pass for the weekend event only. Nat. Brut will be tabling and participating in panels at this awesome event in February 2016 so grab a pass and come down!