Quinn Blogs

Still writing, despite the protestations of a sore wrist and the distractions of wholesome, violent video games. Woohoo! I’ve also upped my daily goal from 800 to 1,000 words; this is partly to quicken my pace and partly a sort of psychological trick, because there’s something very satisfying about crossing each increment of 1,000 words. It just feels more productive. Which, technically, it is.

I think my favorite part of writing a novel is watching the little scrollbar on the side of the screen get smaller and smaller as your word count grows. Every day when I finish writing, I go through my super-paranoid (but still advisable) backup process: I email the full draft from my personal account to my work account. That way I have a copy on my laptop at home, a copy on both email servers, [...]

I hit the 10,000 word mark last night, which is a pretty good feeling. Until I considered the fact that during Nanowrimo, I would have hit that mark six days in; this time it took nearly a month.

But this isn’t Nanowrimo. It’s easy to forget that, although I’m working on it. Naturally I’m inclined to compare writing this novel with writing my two previous ones; it’s my only frame of reference. But the one downside of Nanowrimo was that it made me less patient with the process of writing. And as I’ve said before, if you want to be a published novelist, you need nothing if not patience.

So yeah, 10,000 words. I’m definitely putting words on the page, and if I pick up my pace just a little bit, I should easily have a completed draft by [...]

I forgot, I was going to actually explain what Hubris is about. It’s an urban fantasy / comedy about a young woman who sets out to kill all the gods. Think Kill Bill (or Lady Snowblood, from which Tarantino borrowed liberally), except the fate of the universe hangs in the balance.

There’s quite a bit more to it than that, but since much of the plot is liable to change during the writing process, I’ll leave the description at that for now.

Making this novel work is going to be a challenge. My previous two books featured a single first-person narrator who told the story in chronological order. Simple stuff. But this book has an omniscient third-person narrator who assumes various characters’ points of view, and there are at least three parallel storylines: two set in the present, and [...]

That’s my word count so far. Work continues; slower perhaps than I had hoped, but I’m writing, and that’s a good thing.

For the last few months my biggest distraction has been the open-source Flash adventure game engine I’ve been developing, but I’m finally nearly done with it and ready to release it to the unwashed masses of the Internet. Why create an open-source adventure engine? Why not? I’m often seized by these pointless diversions, but lately I’ve stopped really fighting them. I figure if I’m passionate about something I should just do it. At least I’ll have some kind of product to show for it, and honestly, it’s a rare privilege to actually enjoy putting a lot of time into a project. No sense wasting passion.

Plus, it’s been a great learning experience, both in terms of the [...]

The last few months have been a nice, soupy mix of outlining, working on side projects, procrastinating, and moving from one Chicago neighborhood to another, but the time has come at last. This morning I finally sat down and started writing Hubris.

It’s funny just how mundane the act of writing is once you get down to doing it. After all that anticipation, it wasn’t particularly strenuous or exciting to type out the first 700 or so words. There will certainly be emotional moments, if my track record is any indication, but for the most part, it’s just one word after another, and the steady clicking of laptop keys.

It’s also funny how much I’m still wedded to my word count; that’s the Nanowrimo mentality, one that I’ll probably always have. I’m expecting the first draft of Hubris [...]