Jae Onasi

All three for me, please. Thanks!

Good luck with all your appointments!

We all write "sh!tty first drafts" as Anne Lamott hilariously notes in her book Bird by Bird. But that's ok, because now you have a first draft, and yesterday you didn't have one!

Pep talk from Anne Lamott, one of my favorite authors on writing. https://nanowrimo.org/pep-talk-from-anne-lamott Edit: My name on the nanowrimo site, not surprisingly, is Jae Onasi.

I'm going to revise about 50k words of my novel so I can get the second draft done. I need to finish this puppy and find an agent. @witchbolts I LOVE the idea of a write-in! Tagging @Laysa who's also participating in Nanowrimo this month (not sure if non-club members can see this, however.

I’ve known for some time about Peter’s Evil Overlord List of things one should never do as an Evil Overlord. I think I learned about it from a friend on LucasForums about 10 years back. Now and then I revisit it when I’m having a crappy day and need a good laugh. A couple days ago I also ran across the The Not So Grand List of Overused Fantasy Clichés. I fell over laughing. I figured a lot of us probably write fantasy/sci-Fi since we obviously enjoy playing games in the fantasy genre. The fantasy list was inspired by the Grand List of Over-used Sci Fi Storylines. Click the section links to get to the entries themselves. Don’t drink anything before reading these unless you like spewing on your monitor. Enjoy.

They switched to a new site recently--that might be the source of the errors.

I need to revise about 50k words of the novel I just finished, so I’m going to do that this year instead of writing. The characters in my novel are itching to go on another adventure, so I might work on an outline for the next book, too. I haven’t won yet, but it seems just about every November in the last 5 years, I’ve been hit with some nasty Real Life stuff (like cross country moves and kid in the hospital level stuff) that wiped out the goal. Saying a little prayer that this November will be a little more calm.

That's sort of how it went with my Jolee Bindo fanfic--the fanfic group I was in would poke me if I went longer than a few days between entries and ask "When are you posting again? We want to know what comes next!". That was always fun to see. Of course, I routinely left them on cliffhangers.

There's a gal in the Atlanta Nanowrimo branch who works at the library branch closest to me--she was excited to hear about the idea, too. Small world!

I feel your pain! After losing a major project on a dead laptop, I've always emailed myself copies of major works. Now I save them on a portable hard drive as well as either Google Docs or my email, because I'm just that paranoid about losing something as big as a novel. I just finished my second novel, "The Gryffoniers." My first novel was accidental. It was a KOTOR fanfic that was supposed to be only 30-ish pages long. Around page 50, I realized I'd only gotten about a third of the way through my plot. The story ended up about 200 pages long. It's complete newbie writer trash, and I learned a lot and loved every minute of writing it. I made every mistake possible. I'm ok with that. The second novel is written much better, especially after having the first 2/3rds or so workshopped in a writing group. Sadly, since I moved, I haven't found another writer group close enough to me to join. I might start one myself at the local library.

Name generator for just about everything you could want--names (real and fantasy), places, pop culture, magic items, vehicles, diseases, even meteors. https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/ Master list of facial expressions for when you need something besides "S/he looked at...." https://www.bryndonovan.com/2015/04/05/master-list-of-facial-expressions/ I like some of the other master lists (especially colors and physical descriptions), too. Huge color list: https://kathysteinemann.com/Musings/colors/ Power thesaurus is my new go-to thesaurus besides my huge paperback one sitting on my desk. I like it because it can sort by parts of speech and links antonyms, definitions and examples as well. https://www.powerthesaurus.org/ Non-verbal body language http://bodylanguageproject.com/nonverbal-dictionary/ It gives you the body language and then the emotion, so that if your character crosses her legs, for instance, you can take a look at the entry for "leg crossing" and see what kind of leg cross and even the direction of the feet you want your character to take in order to convey the emotion better. It might take a little bit of reading on the Body Language Project site to learn some of the terminology. Some free worksheets and other useful items: https://allfreelancewriting.com/novel-planning-tools-and-worksheets/ Software: Dramatica Pro--I picked this up after Nanowrimo a few years ago. http://www.write-bros.com/dramatica-pro.html It's more of a theorycrafting approach to story telling, and since I discovered it midway through writing my novel, it didn't have as much utility for me as it might have if I'd used it from the beginning. However, the idea spinner has gotten me out of some spots where I was just stuck and didn't know where to go next. There's also a screen-writing version. I use Scrivener for word processing and organizing my novel. There's often a special during and right after Nanowrimo. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview If you want a free software package and don't mind that the program isn't being updated anymore, the owner is now giving away the license key and maintaining the site. http://www.writewaypro.com/ I used this one in the past and enjoyed it, but Scrivener offers some more options that I wanted. Writeway is easier to learn, but if you can game, you can handle the tech on either program just fine. *Looks in bookmarks, realizes there are a bazillion more interesting sites....* This is a good start.

I'd like to be more active in game and see the guild grow, but I'm working on a major revision of my novel to get it ready to send out to agents, so my time is zip to devote to more gaming.