Words: 1693 total. Most of it was several pages of “Adventures in Pithea” I got through revising. (Missy has been corrected in her accusation toward Evan, though he still found a way to be a jerk.) The rest of it, though only a measly 135 words, was original writing, and requires a longer explanation than 135 words probably should.

In October, my husband and I went to a con in Ohio called Ohio Valley Filk Festival. It was our first con. We were only there for one afternoon, and it was a small con. However, in the dealer’s room, there was a wide selection of books. We spent quite some time there. I came away with a book that has already changed the way I think about plotting, creating characters, writing, and even sleeping. It is called Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror and inside are “lively and practical insight and exercises, straight from the top speculative genre writers working today”.

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, I have decided to start going through the exercises in the book. Not all of them actually pertain to me (most of the horror-related articles, for example), so I’ll skip those. But I plan to try to focus on one article per week, and see how that goes. This week’s article involved using random images as story seeds, forcing two images together and developing a story idea or even new story world from those. This morning, I wrote with that in mind, with two images I’d generated a few days ago. It didn’t produce quite what the exercise was expecting, but I do already have an entire world I’m writing in. It was still an interesting idea I may pursue in one of my storylines someday though.