H.S. Stone's Blog, page 42

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The NaNoWriMo website let's authors track their progress throughout the month and hands out certificates to those who finish a novel of at least 50,000 words by the end of the month.

I heard about this a few years ago and have always been too chicken to try it because I didn't think I had it in me to write a novel at all, much less to do it within a month. Now that I've actually written a novel, I might consider participating in NaNoWriNo...

Goodreads

For two years, I had been using the weRead Facebook app as my online bookshelf. I had never used anything to track my books electronically before, and at the time, weRead seemed like a good choice because some of my other Facebook friends used it too. Now, two years later, I'm switching to Goodreads. There are several reasons for making the switch:

1. I don't like having to log in to Facebook to view or update my bookshelf.
2. The weRead app is down more often than I like.
3. The functionality i...

Writing is fun, editing not so much

I have spent the last three weeks editing my book based on feedback from proofreaders. It hasn't been fun. Unlike writing, which I enjoy doing, I find editing to be more like work than like fun. Part of the reason is that I'm tired of going over the manuscript so many times. Since starting on the first draft, I've worked on the entire story seven times already, and I expect to go over it all at least once more. I've written and re-written some parts of it more than ten times, probably more th...

Advice for aspiring writers

No, I'm not qualified to give advice to any aspiring writers. I'm talking about an article that prolific comic book writer Ron Marz penned giving advice to his 10-year-old daughter. The article is titled "Advice to a 10-Year-Old", but it applies to anyone who is thinking about writing full-time.

I got a chuckle out of his first piece of advice -- "I will tell her that if she wants to be a writer, she has to be a reader" -- because of my last blog post about writers who don't like to read.  :-...

Wanting to write without wanting to read

I came across a Salon.com article titled "Writers who don't read" that talked about the growing number of young writers who don't like to read. At first, the article made me angry at these aspiring writers because I believe that the two prerequisites to writing well are (1) reading a lot and (2) writing a lot. Anyone who thinks they can be a good writer without reading is just crazy. My love of writing grew out of my love of reading. I'm not a great writer (yet), but I wouldn't even be half t...

Why I write?

It's a sad commentary that I felt the article "80% of People Quietly Despise Their Lives" described me so well. It's not that I hate myself or my life, but I can honestly say that I "dislike the things [I] must do in order to make the living that will allow [me] to continue disliking [my] life".

But this isn't a post to gripe about life or to solicit pity. It's to talk about what makes my life more worthwhile, namely writing. There was a thread on the Kindle Boards a couple of weeks ago ...