Networking and National Writing Month

Getting Tips in Unlikely Places

So last week was Nekocon, an anime convention.  At the end of a panel titled "How to Make Your Geek Job a Reality", I had the opportunity to share with the panelists the websites I have created.  While I was there at the anime convention to promote websites not titled "Indie Author Tiffany", one of the panelists discussed National Novel Writing Month.  

National Novel Writing Month 

Apparently November is a month when writers get together and write a novel as soon as possible.  Before I turned ten I was able to quickly create long stories within a month and check my grammar and spelling mistakes to the best of my abilities (the best a ten-year-old could).  I find with a deadline, cases with writer's block has been happening less and less now.   My deadline for this month is to finish my rough draft for my story or at least get REALLY close to finishing my electronic book.

I just created an account today on National Novel Writing Month.  There are prizes for people who accomplish writing 50,000 words at the end of November but I am more concerned with finishing my rough draft.   

This Website 

For anyone who is actually reading this website, may have noticed that I barely update.  The reason for the lack of updates is simple; I do not know what to write about on this site.  That's the honest truth.  In addition to writing my first draft at a quick pace this month, I will be looking at other indie author websites and seeing what these authors put on their websites.   By doing this, I will get some ideas and there will be more posts in the future.

This post brought to you by the website: Indie Author Tiffany

Setting a Writing Schedule

For a while, I have been getting into the habit of writing.  Of course the most common and cliched advice I have ever heard was to begin writing at least thirty minutes a day.  Making myself put a pencil to the paper and force myself to write for thirty minutes helped me develop a habit and a schedule.

Without developing this habit, my story would forever stay in my head and would never become an electronic book.  The discovery of making new ideas or changing a few elements to make my story more exciting and understandable is fun.  Of course I am still a human being and I have missed the opportunity to write my story and my idea out for the day.  Sometimes the harshness of life or unexpected events in my life do get in the way my schedule.

Because I write my ideas on paper first, I am able to travel to different areas in order to write.  Traveling to different parts of my neighborhood and writing a story which takes place in my state, really helps my story's setting.

So far, my story is a contemporary fantasy set in Virginia Beach, Virginia with merpeople, witches, and romance.  I may or may not have a summary for the story in the next few weeks.

One Way to Get Ideas for a Setting

I found I was missing an important element of writing a story when trying to write an idea for a Fantasy ebook.  I had the characters, conflict, and general outline of the story figured out.  When I put my pencil against my notebook paper, I realized I somehow forgot to figure out the setting of my story. Sometimes coming up with the setting for a story can be difficult. 

My fantasy story is set in my state of residence so making up a different world was not necessary. I needed to pick a nearby or far off neighborhood with a lake and start the story there. 

1. Simply typing my state and the neighborhood into Google's search engine was not enough. I never saw my desired neighborhood in Google images or I did not see anything inspirational for my writing.

2. I thought Youtube videos would work for me since there are a lot of people who do video logs outside in their backyard.  I targeted video logs with lakes in the background.  I still wanted to see more of the background.

3. Watching videos on TV or informative shows about lakes gave me the feel of what life by a lake was like.  This was information that I really do need but I felt like I wanted more.

Finally I felt like moving away from lakes and writing about oceans and life at the beach.  My state has a well known beach which plenty of tourists travel to during the summer.  At times, I would visit this beach to go swimming, shopping, and observing the tourists.  There are plenty of concerts, carnivals, and other forms of entertainment at specific seasons of the year at this beach.

With all the events going on there, I knew this beach was a good place to set my story in for conflicts and characters.  The best part about this beach was that I could visit the beach on my time off and experience the shopping, concerts, and carnivals myself.  When I am done and ready to leave, I could simply take pictures and look at them for reference.

Sometimes we need to touch the sand, smell the salt, listen to the seagulls cry, or hear the loud music of concerts in order to get inspiration for writing settings. I am fond of searching on Google for ideas, looking at video logs of people's experience on Youtube, or informational shows on TV.  However nothing beats real life experiences.