Until recently, I never really considered the value of counting the total words I write each day.  As a writer, I tend to revise as I go.   Since my goal, even while drafting, has never been mainly to get new words on the page, I always suspected if I actually kept a running count I would come away feeling like I wasn’t making an real progress.  Of course, new words do get added, but plenty of other words get changed or moved around along the way.

Instead of counting words, I’ve always measured my writing progress in terms of completed chapters.   When my non-writing friends (the few who I’ve been brave enough to actually tell I’m writing a book) ask me how my writing is coming along saying,   ‘I’ve finished drafting chapter 12′ goes over much better than, ‘I wrote 1,200 words today.  Good ones, too!‘.  The latter typically results in blank stares or a friendly but abrupt observation about the weather.

Nevertheless, I recently started tracking my total word count and have even gone so far as to add a word count widget to my blog.  I’m still not sure how much it will help me in the long run, but here are some of the benefits I can already see for those who do it.

• Estimating Your Completion Date:  If you set a goal for how long you want your book to be, and you’ve been tracking how may words you write per day, you’ll have a rough idea when you’re initial draft will actually be completed.
• Setting Goals:  If you want to set a goal goal for when to have your draft completed, you can lay out your writing strategy in measurable chunks to reach your goal (or even to determine if your writing goal is too lofty for you.)
• Providing Status Updates:  For established writers with a growing fan base, this can be a fun way of bringing eager readers into the process while keeping them updated on your latest project.
• Staying Motivated:  Seeing the numbers increasing daily or weekly means your novel is growing.  ’Nuff said.
• Accountability:  Sometimes writers need the accountability a public display of writing progress offers.  This allows your writing friends to either offer their congrats or to bust your chops which ever the case may be.

If you’re interested in setting up your own and your progress bar and you’re using WordPress you can get the plugin I use at http://jasonpenney.net/wordpress-plugins/progpress/.  There are other options which work on all platforms such as http://www.writertopia.com/toolbox/meters.  These don’t require WordPress at all, just simple HTML which can be placed on any blog anywhere.

What about you?  Do you track word counts?  If you do, do you find them to be discouraging or do they actually help?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’m in!!!

If you’re anything like me you’re constantly looking for little snatches of time to write whenever and wherever you can find them.  Since we can’t always be in our preferred writing space when time for writing presents itself, or even when inspiration strikes, we make due as we can.  During her Harry Potter days, J.K. Rowling even once resorted to writing on the back of an air sickness bag!

While there are any number of ways to take notes on the go, for me the challenge has always been in how to effectively bringing everything back together later.  Retyping handwritten notes can be time consuming, as can copying and pasting notes from one disconnected electronic location to another (email, text files, USB drive, etc.).  For the most part, anything that isn’t about just getting the words on the page can feel a lot like wasted time.  Time that would be better spent actually writing.

Enter . . . Dropbox!

Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc.  It utilizes cloud computing to enable users to backup, store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization.  Dropbox is a free service, however, paid subscriptions are also available for those with serious file storage/sharing needs.

(For more information about all the possibilities for Dropbox and its supported hardware platforms you can check out this excellent video tour made by the folks at Creative Commons.)

Rather than extolling all the virtues of Dropbox allow me to sum up the highlights specific to writers.

Backups

Files saved on your computer are automatically saved to your Dropbox (cloud) account in real time as you save them.  That means they’re backed up almost instantly.  No more need to burn copies of everything each night to CD/DVD or to create redundant fire safe flash drives, couriered off-site or hidden nightly in the bomb safe bunker beneath your house.  And you can also stop emailing those files to yourself each night as a way to back them up in case your computer decides to go on strike.

Revision History

Ever saved over something you’ve worked on only to realize an instant too late what you’ve done?  Ever deleted something by accident only to realize a week or more later, after you’ve cleared your Recycle Bin, that it’s missing?  Dropbox has you covered here too.  Dropbox keeps ALL the versions of any file in your account for 30 days.  That’s A LOT of revision history.  Unless you keep dated backup copies or dated file folders (both of which I’ve tried) you won’t have proper versions just making nightly copies.

Control

There’s no need to worry that everything on your computer will be copied to your Dropbox account if you signup.  You decide what parent folder you want Dropbox to monitor.  You can use the default Dropbox folder recommended during installation or you can specify a different one as your Dropbox home.  You can even move it later on.

Access

You can also install Dropbox on as many computers or handheld devices as you like, regardless of the operating system, and then link them all to your Dropbox account.  Because Dropbox resides in the “cloud” you can literally access your files from any location with an Internet connection (whether or not Dropbox is installed there); a friend’s house, a public library, your Grandma’s computer during a few stolen minutes on during those LONG holiday visits.  (Okay, let’s pretend I didn’t suggest that last part.)  In other words, with Dropbox you can rest assured you’ll always be able to get to your files.  Anytime.  Anywhere.

Collaboration

Dropbox can also making collaborating with others much simpler.  You can either share your actual Dropbox account with someone else or you can securely share only specific files or folders with them.  Plus, you always have the option to make anything in your Dropbo public to the world.  Dropbox can even display an popup message in the taskbar when a document in your Dropbox is added or updated from another location.  (I set up my 13YO daughter to keep her files in my Dropbox on my home computer.  It always makes me smile when the filename of a document she’s working on, like her latest book, discreetly pops up on my screen.)

Integration

In my case, Dropbox not only connects files on my iPod Touch, it integrates directly with some of the writing apps I use almost every day.  Specifically, I do most of my work in Microsoft Word (and Microsoft Excel) and so I use the Documents To Go iPhone app because it lets me edit files in both Office 2003 and Office 2007 while retaining all formatting and special features (more info here).  What’s great about Documents To Go is that I can link it to my Dropbox too.  From my iPod Touch I have access to all my writing documents and can edit them just as I would if I was sitting at my desk.  I also don’t have to worry about losing formatting by switching between file editors when I work from different locations.

Storage…Storage…Storage

2GB of free space!  Need I say more?

There’s so much more I could write about uses for Dropbox beyond simply writing (on-line photo album, video sharing, eBook archives, etc.) but I’ll limit myself just to writing in this post.

If you decide to start using Dropbox because of my recommendation, let me know what you think of it!  I’d love to hear from you.  I can’t imagine you’ll be disappointed.

Incidentally, if you DO decide to signup, consider using this referral link when you do.  Using it will give you (and me too as it happens) an extra 250MB of extra space from the get go.  I’ve been using Dropbox since its beta days and am only around 11% into my 2GB so I don’t need the space (yet).  But since you can put whatever you want in there I thought you might appreciate the extra 250MB in addition to the whopping 2GB you’ll already get when you start.

Happy Writing!

Thanks for your interest!

Per the contest rules the story must begin with the words…

‘Some people swore that the house was haunted.‘

and end with the words…

‘Nothing was ever the same again after that.‘

UPDATE: Per the entry guidelines the story could only be 600 words and required a title. I’ve called it “The Gift”.

“Some people swore that the house was haunted,” the woman behind the counter insisted. “Everyone who’s ever bought it has brought it back.”

I eyed her skeptically. Haunted? I always heard hauntings occurred in places of terrible suffering where spirits of the dead lingered when they couldn’t escape their pain. Not that I believed in ghosts, but even so, how could a dollhouse be haunted?

The old man beside her lovingly patted her wrinkled hand. “Never mind that, sir,” he said, smiling at me. “She’s got a bit of an imagination.”

“It’s no imagining! The little girl in the family that returned it told me so herself.”

He smiled gently in reply. “They told me they returned it because the rooftop latch is broken and they couldn’t open the dollhouse.”

“So it has been returned before?” I interrupted.

“Only once,” he corrected. “I’ve been meaning to fix it.”

I nodded then made a show of examining the rest of the dollhouse, intending to negotiate a reduced price. In truth, I’d made up my mind to buy it as soon as I entered the shop. My daughter’s birthday was the next day and as usual business travel had made this a last minute effort. If I picked something up today I could still get it to her by overnight express since I wouldn’t be returning home myself until the end of the week. Besides, it seemed to me a nice dollhouse was just the thing any little girl would want most for her birthday. Determined to keep my lunch appointment I turned to make my offer, but the shopkeepers had stepped away. I almost called them back, but I didn’t want to appear too eager. So, I contented myself by really looking at the dollhouse while I waited.

It was a beautiful, two-story colonial model, painted white with black shutters and a red door. I’d glanced into a few of the downstairs windows before I finally noticed them. Magazine clippings of assorted pairs of men and women had been glued to the walls in every room, and between each pair was a cutout photograph of a brown-eyed little girl. All three were staged in various activities together: eating, playing games, reading stories. The girl’s clothing varied, but the uneven cutting showed the same tattered patch of wallpaper behind her where she’d posed herself for each scene.

A heavy, sinking feeling filled my chest as my eyes slowly passed from room to room. The last room, which I somehow knew would be the master bedroom, had a black curtain hanging in the window. I couldn’t see inside. My chest tightened and my hands began to tremble. Full of a sudden, overwhelming dread, I knew I had to see what was inside that room. I fumbled with the rooftop latch, hoping to see inside the room from above. Someone had glued the rooftop down. Without thinking, I seized the rooftop by the eaves and wrenched it free from the dollhouse.

The bedroom below was empty.

I stood panting from exertion and spent emotion. It was true. The dollhouse was haunted. Its ghosts were the scenes this little girl had created for herself of the one thing she wanted most in the world but couldn’t have. Now they haunted me too. I paid the shopkeepers for the ruined dollhouse and then tenderly laid it to rest in a dumpster behind the shop. I drove straight back to my hotel, checked out, and booked the first flight that would get me home to my daughter before morning.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

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And of course since this is for YA Highway I have to pimp my very own YA Highway post from back in the wee early days of the “Highway” when the uber-thoughtful Kirsten Hubbard invited me to share a guest post because I’d played so nicely with the other bloggers. :)

• Finding Your Voice (on YA Highway)

Invite your characters over for dinner.

Out here in the real world a simple and fun way get to know someone better is to share a meal with them.  So why not do the same with your new characters?  While your at it why not invite all the characters from your current WIP over at the same time?  Instead of just dinner, hold a banquet!

Once you’ve made the decision to play host and the imaginary invitations have been sent out, the real work of character observation begins.

Here is a list of some things you’ll want to pay attention to as your fictional evening unfolds:

• Which of your characters was late and which ones were on time?
• Who took the time to RSVP and who simply showed up at your door?
• Did anyone come empty handed?  If not, what did they bring?
• Did anyone arrive unexpected or uninvited?  Who decided to bring a date along?
• How did each of them come dressed for the occasion?
• Who seemed happy to be there and who seemed annoyed?
• How did they each arrange themselves at the table?  Did anyone presume to sit at the head of the table?
• Assuming you’re a stupendous host with a boundless spread of delicacies, what kinds of foods did each of them eat?  Are any of them vegetarians?  Vegans?
• Who knew which fork was for what?  Who talked with their mouth full?
• Who put their napkin in their lap?  Or tucked it into their collar?  Who didn’t bother using a napkin at all?
• Did anyone pick at or push their food around on their plate?  Who cleaned their plates or asked for seconds?  Or thirds?!?
• Did anyone try to make off with any of your stuff when no one was looking?
• Which of your characters dominated the conversation?  Who sat quietly trying not to be noticed?
• Who was ready to, or needed to, go home as soon as the meal was over?  Did anyone stay too late and wear out their welcome to they had to be asked to leave?
• Did anyone find the liquor cabinet then need a cab to get home or even pass out on your couch?
• . . .

The purpose of the exercise is simply to notice how each of your individual characters behaves in a commonplace, imaginary setting.  This can help you better distinguish your characters from each other as well as point out where some of your characters are more alike than you had thought.  The most most thing here is to give each of your characters plenty of room to act freely then expect to be surprised!

It can be difficult, even painful at times, to throw away some those early, hard fought words or scenes from your early drafts.  Spending a little time up front really getting to know your characters first can help you hit the ground running when you do sit down to draft.   And if you feel you may be one of those writers who keeps too much early drafting around, simply plan in advance to use disposable tableware.

Just in case.

I thought I’d give it a shot.

A strong “guy” character in fiction is one who is confident in who he is (which doesn’t mean he’s not vulnerable), he has a distinct personality of his own making him interesting in his own right, and he doesn’t become someone else with the introduction of a love interest.  That’s not to say that falling in love (like having children) doesn’t push people to be better versions of themselves for the sake of those new relationships.  It certainly does!  (Or at least it should.)  What it DOES mean is that a strong character (male or female for that matter) is one who doesn’t stop being the person they are – the person the other character fell in love in the first place.

I’ve always believed a healthy relationship is built around two people looking together in the same direction, not two people (or even just one of them) looking only at the other.  For the story to carry on after the romance ensues, strong characters are those who expand the scope of their own interests, even their lives, to include the other without completely trading in their independence for dependence (or even worse, co-dependence).  It’s a delicate balance.

Nevertheless, each of the characters had a life before they met and each needs to continue to have a life after they meet, albeit an expanded one.  After all, where’s the excitement, or the conflict (fictionally speaking), in a relationship where one partner is merely hanging on the heels of the other doing nothing but waiting to be needed?  Without that underlying, ongoing tension which keeps them independent yet together, the romance is over.  Even if the characters themselves don’t appear to be bored with each other, the reader almost certainly will be.

Most of us are familiar with the expression, “Never judge a book by its cover”. In other words, don’t assume what something is like based only how it looks. This expression is usually offered as an admonition about people and prejudice, but here I want to consider its literal meaning with regards to actual books.

YA is a growing genre with many talented writers crafting and contributing new stories which in turn expand the genre’s scope and readership.  (You can read more about it an article in this month’s Los Angeles Times.)  Nevertheless, I’m always struck when I stroll through my local Borders bookstore by what I see on the book covers in the YA fiction section.

First, a quick word about marketing.

Authors know that publishers make the final decision about cover art for the books they publish, not the authors themselves.  (There are exceptions of course, but not many.)  Authors also understand book covers are as much about marketing as they are about distilling the essence of the story with a picture.  Covers sell books.  This may mean a publisher might choose to emphasize a more marketable aspect of a book for its cover, while the author may feel a different aspect is really at the core of the story.  For the most part the authors I follow have been very happy with the final covers their books receive.  That’s a good thing!  But sometimes publishers miss the mark.

So what does this have to do with boys and YA?

I mentioned before I’m struck by what I see whenever I visit the YA section of the bookstore.  What strikes me is how little I see most of these images appealing to teenage boys.  As an adult I am happy to stop and pick up a few titles for a closer look.  Partly this is out of simple curiosity and partly this is because I’ve connected with some of these authors writing in the YA genre through social networks.  They’ve shared their views about their books and about their own writing process, in turn I feel more connected to them and so I’m interested in seeing their titles first first-hand.  However, a teenage boy walking through a bookstore won’t have my agenda.

He’ll see a book on the shelf and that book will have a precious few seconds to try to grab his attention long enough for him to hopefully pick it up and find out more.  If the cover art suggest the story is mostly a romance, he’s not likely to be interested.  If the cover features a lone, racy, weapon-clad heroine, with little else to depict the “story”, the image will scream “girl book” and he’ll leave it on the shelf.  Worse yet, if those covers make him feel at all embarrassed, like he’s wandered somewhere in the bookstore he shouldn’t be, he wouldn’t dare to pick one up, especially if he thought anyone was looking.  And more than likely, he’d likely simply steer clear of the YA section altogether.

So what’s the answer?

If we want more boys to read within the YA genre then publishers need to reconsider boys when making cover art decisions and stop making so many YA titles look like something they wouldn’t be interested in.

I couldn’t help but wonder while writing this post if J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was to be published for the first time in 2010 what the book covers would look like.  I suspect they would end up looking more like the covers for the DVDs rather than the lovely artwork of Mary GrandPre which depicts more of the story without the racy intensity of the main characters.

So that’s my take.  The opinion of one (to quote Kate Hart of YA Highway) “brave male soul in a world of women YA bloggers”.  (This still makes me laugh every time I read it!  Thanks Kate!)

Okay, it’s your turn.  Please feel free to let me have it in the comments.