Gearing up for NaNo

Old Hillside Cemetery in Reno Nevada – the Civil War plot for those who served in the Civil War.

It’s the middle of October and time to start getting organized for this year’s NaNoWriMo.  I’ve been working on my character sheets for the next novel in the Funeral Singer series.  I have an outline and the next step is to organize all this in Scrivener so that when I start writing on November 1st, I will be ready to knock out a bunch of words from the get-go.

November is not without additional challenges to the writing.  I will be out of town three days of it and Wizard World Comic Con in Reno will take another three days out of the writing time although I will still try to write each day, even if it’s in a notebook to be typed in later.

In spite of that, I love the extra push that writing during NaNo gave me last year and I hope to have as great an experience this year.  If you’re a writer and haven’t gotten involved with your regional group for NaNo, you might be missing out on the “we’re all in this together” group feel that writing, even online, at the same time and comparing word counts with others incentive that you get from the program.  It’s a great boost and it really helped me to turn off the internal editor and just write.  The first draft needs work, but you’ve got a book when you’re done.

So over the next month, I’ll post about my progress on the next novel during NaNo.  I do have a title and the story line is really a good one, I think.  But then I’m a little biased.   Suffice it to say that Gillian Foster will still be dealing with the consequences of the first book while learning more about her “gift”.  I’m looking forward to the story myself and can’t wait to learn what she has to tell me.

Speaking of Funeral Singer, thus far, the first novel of the series, A Song for Marielle has been pretty well received, although I’ve only gotten eight reviews at this point.  Seven are on Amazon and one is on Good Reads.  I really encourage any of you who have read the book to please leave a review on Amazon and/or Good Reads. For any author, the reviews are important feedback as well as a way to let other readers know how a book is received.  Thank you to all who take the time to leave reviews.