Doing the NaNoWriMo – Novel in 30 days

Writing a novel in Thirty Days with NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month

NaNoWriMo – the contest which is the National novel writing month that takes place every November. This is what I’m taking part in this November and it is the first time that I have done so. I wanted to take part in NaNoWriMo last year, but I had too many things to do. In some ways this year, I am also in the situation where I have too many things to do, but I’m going to write 50,000 words for a novel anyway.

As I write this I am into the second day of the NaNoWriMo and enjoying it so far. I have written three scenes for the story which is called ‘A Geeks Day out’. My word count at present is just over 3000, so only another 47,000 to do. In terms of the number of words required per day it is only 1700 approximately. Of course that does assume that you are able to write every single day for 30 days. I think I would like to work in terms of having a target of 2000 words per day so that after a week or so, I will be slightly ahead of the curve. I know that there will be some days when it is going to be more difficult to crank out the words. This is not because of hitting writers block and not knowing what to write next for the story, but more to do with if my wife is at home. I tend to get a less work done. Funny that, isn’t it?

-Writing to make money

At the same time as I am writing for the NaNoWriMo novel, I still have to keep working on writing the articles for my websites. Last month was both a good month and a bad month. It was good in as much as, I earned €20 more than I did at the previous month, and the reason for that was hitting a particular good keyword towards the end of the month that brought me in thousands more visitors over a period of two days. More traffic to the site equals more money. It is good that it happened when it did because two days after that event, Google make changes to their search algorithms and my search traffic dropped to about a quarter or a third of what it was. Less traffic to the site equals less money. So that was the bad part of the good and bad statement about the month.

What does the future hold for writing for money?

For the moment the Amazing iPad website which was my moneymaking website before the Google change, I am quite disappointed. The website is full of great information and is a content driven super site, which is the type of site that Google is supposed to like. So on one hand I have to kind of wonder, what it is that I can do to bring this site back to life again, and on the other hand I can be hopeful that if I just keep working at it the way that I have, then it should come good again.

Rather than have all my eggs in one basket, I have two other websites that are already are indexed by Google and are doing okay for the amount of content that is on the site. One of those sites is doing quite nicely and the click through, that I get from it are usually nice earners. I tend to get a higher payment for the click through here, than I did from the other site. So it will make sense to write a lot of articles for this site, to have content there that people will keep coming back for.

The next thing that I have done is to start up a new site. I started this new site a couple of days after the Google changes, which was just over a week ago and today was the first day of getting some search traffic. I only have five articles on the site so far, but they are long and informative, content driven articles. With this new site I don’t intend to do any link building articles in any other places. I plan to only write articles for the site and to promote them using amplify.com and Scoop.it, alongside promoting in Facebook and Google plus. I have already created a Facebook page especially for this new site.

Creating graphics for my websites

Pixelmator 2.0 review

With me being a graphic designer & sign writer in my previous life, I find that I still enjoy doing that sort of work. For my new website I have been using a logo design tool called Art Text 2 which is great for doing designs which look like they are 3-D. I can easily give text a 3-D look, so that they have the pillow shape or the bevelled shape. I can add backgrounds to the design, or sometimes what I will do is to take the text and put it in as a layer into Pixelmator.

Pixelmator has just been upgraded to version 2 and I bought it because it was much much cheaper than if I was to buy Photoshop. Besides it is a particularly good application for working with bitmaps and now it also does some vectors. The Pixelmator application works really well and on top of that it looks very pretty while doing it.

Video and using my time best

The writing has to take precedence at the moment, but I am also very keen to spend more time doing my digital artwork. That digital artwork includes making videos, learning how to use Motion and Final Cut Pro X. Doing any sort of work on video is very time-consuming, so I think I can expect not to do much video during November. So for the moment I will be pencilling in December as a month for doing video. The NaNoWriMo novel will be finished by then, at least the first draft of the novel at any rate will be completed, there will still be the editing and numerous rewrites to do, if I decide that it is worth taking the NaNoWriMo novel further to have a finished novel that could be published. I wish !!

ISCA Minicon in Girona

Girona ISCA Minicon

SteveHearn Last week I went and looked in at the ISCA Minicon in Girona, Catalonia, Northern Spain. Basically I went to meet with Steve Hearn the president of the ISCA (International Society of Caricature Artists) I have already interviewed him for the Mac20Q podcast and so it was excellent to meet up in person.

The day that visited there were about 20 or so of the artists doing their drawings that contorted the features to make the victims – I mean subjects – Look funny. A number of the artists were owners of the iPad and I talked to them a little about how they use the ipad as an artist. There are some cool amazing iPad applications that let you create drawings on the iPad.

There were some people doing 3D caricatures using a modelling clay, good quality work, impressive. During the event they were having competitions to do likenesses of people and of course to make outrageous caricatures of subjects. At time they were working from photos and also from life. If you sat still in one place for any length of time you would have someone draw you.

It was interesting to hear some of the stories of how they were doing as artists and tales of seeing their work being used as examples by unscrupulous street caricature artists. There were some artists that were making a living from drawing caricatures, as does Steve Hearn. he goes to weddings and draws the guests and tells jokes while doing it.

One of the artist there was drawing on a tablet computer and printing out the finished images. The tablet computer was up on an easel and being used like a canvas. Then another had a Wacom Cintiq and was working on some virtual 3D caricatures using zBrush

I shot some video while I was there – Look here for when I have edited it and posted it here.

My son jack the Irish artist

Really pleased to have Jack and Orla visiting for the week, like many of their age they spend too much time unconscious in the bed. But when they do get out of the sack we have had good times visiting places. Today it was the hanging bridge in the gorge nearby which lots of scrambling up and down rocky slopes and paths. The hanging bridge is not that high but is mildly spectacular when you are walking across it. The dog came with us and seemed to think she is a mountain goat, I was amazed at some of the things that she climbed up.

Jack sat down by the hanging bridge to do some drawing of the rocks and the bridge. I shot a bit of video of the time we spent there. I also shot video of the human castles that we saw in Castel d’Aro at the weekend and aside from the video I will make of it to post here and on YouTube I am giving the footage uncut to Orla to play with, seeing as she is into television and video.

Yesterday was a beach day with a visit to beaches on the other side of Platja d’Aro. To get to the beach we wanted we had to go through a small tunnel and walk around the small cliff walk which is called the Cami de Ronda. It is what the authorities use to use to watch out for smugglers on this Mediterranean coast.

bringing in the video from the camera right now – will grab a still from it and some video to post tomorrow.

Listening to the Onion Files

I was looking for an audio book to enjoy and I thought a spy novel by a retired Major might be the thing to captivate me for a while. The first episode was short and not really enough to evaluate the novel and so I downloaded the next two episodes. On listening to the second episode I find myself getting annoyed with the reading of it as much as with the story.

The author Val Patti reads ‘The Onion Files’ himself and probably did the audio editing too. Far too often in the reading he doesn’t take a breath between one paragraph and the next. He probably edited out some of these natural pauses and perhaps forgot to listen to it himself after making the edits. Perhaps even waiting a day or two before listening with a critical ear.

As for the story, I am still unsure. I might get into if I can get past the slightly tedious setting of the scene in this first proper episode. There is a chance that I will listen to the next episode and reserve my judgment after that. I think that listening to other people reading their stories is a brilliant idea before really getting into narrating your own. Planning to do one of my short stories so I can only hope that being critical here will transpose into my own reading. Mind you I do have a major disadvantage to start with, as there is no getting around my Brummie accent.

David in Spain

A little bit of everything

Category Archives: art