Excerpt from Nano!

I've decided to post an excerpt from my NaNoWriMo project, Rockabilly Romance. If you haven't been paying attention, it is a young adult novel and it is in the very early stages of development, so even this passage is subject to change. I love the title though. If it gets published, I hope they don't change that :(

"I slowly turned to face him. Shadows fell in the hollows of his face. Tom was beautiful under the night sky, but he wasn’t Jesse. He wasn’t the boy I saw behind my eyes when I laid down at night. Still I wanted to kiss him. My lips pulled for his. I wanted to feel some kind of warmth, some physical connection to what my heart felt inside. But, no. It wasn’t fair to Tom. I turned back to my tree, running my fingers over the crude engraving. I didn’t want to leave it. Not ever. But I had to remember the reason I was here. Not the real reason, but the cover story."

Make ya wanna read it? Huh? Huh?

Quick update!

I realize I haven't blogged in a while. The reason being, I was away for three days visiting my family (my grandfather celebrated his 75th birthday!) and now that I'm home, I've been plugging every free minute between mothering and getting ready for the holidays, with my new novel project. You can see the little status bar over on the right beneath my profile that auto updates my word count from NaNoWriMo. So far, I'm doing all right. I know I won't be able to write from the 25th till the 29th, so I'm trying to get as much done now as I can to meet that 50k word goal by the 30th.

So far, I'm loving this story. There are a few elements I don't really care for, but I'll work on them later. For example, it is technically a romance (but not the Nora Roberts kind, more like the Maggie Stiefvater kind--although I'm a far cry from being that awesome) but I don't like the idea of the girl needing the guy to be happy. So far, that's pretty much the case. Now, in her situation, it's really out of her hands. There's a deeper reason for her need for said guy, but still, eh. One task I've given myself is to really establish the character of Jenna McBride before bringing in the guy. Another is to make sure the reader understands that Jenna realizes how pathetic her dependency on him really is. Third, is to make her dependency, not pathetic. Revisions will be epic. And I just really like to use the word "epic". I don't think they'll be that awesome.

As for book reviews, I finished reading SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson, but it's not a new release so I'm slacking on writing the review. I promise to do it after NaNoWriMo. I'm not reading anything right now. Can you believe that? It's not because I don't want to. I just haven't gone to buy more books recently. Probably a good thing. For my wallet and for my novel.

New NaNoWriMo "Book Cover"

Of course, this is just for fun. If a book makes it to publishing, the house has control over the cover design (but it's still really fun to make one for yourself!). The idea of NaNoWriMo, is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It's all about quantity, not quality. As author Gayle Forman states, it's like trowing down a lump of clay. You have to get it out there so you can go back and mold it to where you want it. I've had this story in mind for quite some time and I'm ready to throw it down on paper.

Editing (text etc) by me

Photo by FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My crappy cover art

I'm one step below novice in photoshop, but I thought I should make something resembling a book cover for my NaNoWriMo project. Here it is! Aren't you proud of me--I put a text box on an image...I wish I could find a way to make the O's vinyl records that say "Moon Records". That would be cool! Edit: Found it! Working on better versions.

Ok, this is kind of what I want. What I'd like to do, is put crinkled up music paper on top with the title in black font, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

Still not perfect, but I think it's kinda cool. It's just too square. I need to figure out how to put the torn part up more. I'm learning. Slowly.