Writing, Short and Long

The Asylum (on-line writing group I'm in) met this evening.  We didn't cover anything important; it was a chat kind of meeting.  November is coming up fast.  For us that means National Novel Writing Month.  I considered not participating this year, but my buddies won't hear of it.  So I'll be a rebel and work on short stories, because ... 

For eight weeks, starting in September, I'll be taking Mary Robinette Kowal's Writing on the Fast Track short story workshop.  I'm excited and a bit scared.  We already have our first assignment!  When the workshop's over I plan on practicing what I learn.  It would be foolish to turn around and write a novel instead.

I will be busy.  Don't know if blog posts will happen very often.  But I'll be thinking about ya'  ;-)

The Inkwell

Starting in December of 2009, my friend Cindy and I co-wrote a novel.  We didn't plan to.  We were having fun creating a story with some very cooperative characters and it sort of got out of hand.  Initially we thought we'd do it for about a month.  It ended up keeping us busy for more like four months.

We were posting on line as we wrote, in a thread in the National Novel Writing Month forums called The Smoking Pen.  That thread is set up for cooperative writing, and in the beginning other people were contributing as well.  When the story grabbed us and wouldn't let go, Cindy (who is known as Dixiegirl in NaNoLand), started a separate thread called The Inkwell.

In 2012, Cindy set up a writing group consisting of folks who met doing NaNoWriMo (The Asylum:  you don't have to be crazy, just committed).  On several occasions, The Inkwell has come up in conversations as an example of this or that.  Many in the group hadn't read it.  I'd say I should post that some time.

Well, that time has come.

I'm posting it.

That's why there's a new tab at the top here on my blog.  The Inkwell tab will always take you to the initial background post, whether there's a new entry or not.  On the right, under Archive, is the list of entries.  They're numbered sequentially and each is roughly 2000 words long.  Thanks to the magic of cookies, after you've read one the color should change and that can help you keep track of what you've seen.

I think the total length is about 70,000 words, so this will take a while.  I posted a lot in the last few days, but I'll slow down now, to probably just one entry per day.

I hope you enjoy our story.  We certainly had a lot of fun writing it.