NaNoWriMo Feature: Beth Overmeyer

Today I'm happy to have as a guest Critique Circle's own Bethywoo! She is the author of In a Pickle, the one and only Beth Overmeyer. It's great to have you here!

You can find out more about Beth on her blog: http://bethovermyer.blogspot.com

She's also on Twitter: @Bethyo

You can take it from here, girl!

Is this your first time participating in NaNoWriMo?

This is my fifth (or is it my sixth?) attempt at NaNo. What made me decide to participate this year? It's a good time with great support...and I get to write without the worries of perfection/editing as I go--huzzah! As for tackling yet another year, the excitement never really wears off--for me, at least. I am stoked...probably because it's still week one. Week two = Writing blues.

What's your project?

This year, my main project is called Things Heard in a Graveyard. It's a mainstream novel about a man who inherits several family journals, which he tries to transcribe into readable/saleable prose, whilst his evil great aunt sues for said tomes. The old witch has never shown an interest in her family's grave-digging history. Why now?

My second project is for in case I get stuck. It's called Murder in the Afternoon: A Sweets and Sours Mystery (working title. Very, very WORKING title.) It's a paranormal cozy set in a bar. That's all I'm saying for now.

How are you approaching NaNo? Are you in the midst of a writing frenzy, or do you have a carefully thought-out plan?

For the first project, I have a scene-to-scene outline. For the second project, I'm mostly pantsing it. So I'm a plantser!

Have you learned anything from this experience so far? Is there any advice you would like to share with other NaNoWriMoers?

My advice to all you new WriMos out there: Do NOT edit as you go. In fact, don't read back any farther than one paragraph, and only then if you've lost where you are in the story. And even then, you should probably improvise.

Finally, here's an excerpt from Beth's NaNo project. Enjoy!

Here's a very rough (unedited, unpolished) piece of tripe--I mean prose, all extracted from the mainstream novel:

Chapter One

We take in the breath of mourners,

Shelter it in our chests,

Then release it with a heavy sough.

Their air is alien to us,

So we don’t hold it in long.

Once upon a time, some people died…But before that, they lived, and here is a few of their stories.

My dad grew up in a household of gravediggers. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Some suggest and jest that he was born with a bronze shovel in his hands. But, as the proverbial collective of random strangers say: “You can’t take it with you.”

Pop grew out of the business before he grew out of bowl cuts and really bad bellbottoms. He traded in his shovel and calluses for a suit and a family, of which I am a byproduct. As he lay on his deathbed, I wondered if Pops felt he made the right decision. Of course he made the correct one: The boneyard wouldn’t feed three mouths like it once had, if ever it did.

Speaking of tools…

I’m a writer, and I have my own tools of the trade. Like a gravedigger—a nobody suit that my pop always preached agaisnt—I work primarilty with my hands. And like a digger, my hands can get callused. And, we have nothing else in common except maybe a few stories. I never thought I had a thing in common with this other world, to which my dad once belonged, and to which most of my extended family tree still clung to. And I was okay with that.

But death is a funny thing.

When Pops lay on his deathbed, rasping some curses as I took one of his vein-riddled hands in my own, he stared at me with not too-unfriendly eyes and murmured something that I didn’t catch.

It sounded like, “Rasputin.” And I looked around the room, wondering if Pops was seeing his escort to the other world. It would be appropriately poetic if it were Rasputin. I was certain at that moment that the pair would get on well.

“Who—” Argyle Augustus Bohn cleared his throat and licked his papery lips. “Who are you?”

I’d been warned of this. The last stages of any old timer’s illness can result in a form of dementia, I am told. At this moment, I thought the old man was just looking to spite his only son.

“Who are you?” he repeated, patient as a puppy for a belly rub.

It would’ve been easy to say “Arys. I’m your son. Arys. You know, the kid you raised with Mom? You remember Betty Bohn? She was okay when I wanted to change my name. She didn’t threaten to disinherit me. That angel left me with the devil.”

Excellent, Beth! I can't wait to read more! When are you posting on CC?

Thank you so very much for being a guest on my blog. Stay tuned next week for our final NaNoWriMo guest!

NaNoWriMo Feature: Richard Davnall

Well, it's the second week of NaNoWriMo and I bet everyone is feeling it in their fingers. How's that writing going?

Today's feature is author R.J. Davnall, who you can see in the photo on the right. What? You don't recognize him? He's the author of The Second Realm, an ongoing fantasy serial which you can actually download for FREE at Smashwords! Head on over to his blog and check it out!

You can contact Richard at:

@eatthepen

Blog: itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.com

Richard is also doing something I never saw before: he's live-streaming his NaNoWriMo writing on his own online channel twitch.tv/rjdavnall! That's a NaNo first for me! Now, let's move on to the questions.

Is this your first time participating in NaNoWriMo?

This is my fifth NaNo. I was actually planning to sit this one out and just edit, because I'm in very much the same situation you reported (lots of editing to do, plus more teaching responsibilities than in previous years), but then I ended up with the first week of November off from both my jobs, and a new idea emerged on Thursday morning to make sure I really had no excuse to slack off.

What's your project?

My project is 'The Air Itself'. It started life as a horror story, but it's also a sort of cyberpunk/speculative fiction superhero story. My pitch so far is this:

Jane thought they'd escaped. She didn't know what had happened in that derelict neighbourhood, but it had stopped. They'd survived.

But Amanda lost her phone in the process, and now someone's found it. The messages he sends Jane are strange, as if he thinks he knows her but has the wrong person. And they're getting more insistent, too...

How are you approaching NaNo? Are you in the midst of a writing frenzy, or do you have a carefully thought-out plan?

My approach to NaNo can best be summarised by the friend who once shouted at me 'You need to go and look up the definition of 'month'!' I love the pile-it-all-on-right-now headlong rush of NaNo, and it gives me an excuse, once a year, to devote my every waking moment to a story. The result is that I tend to hit 50k pretty quickly (my record is six days and fourteen hours), then slow down to regular NaNo pace after about a week to wrap the project up. This year I've gone even more mad; I'd love to hit 50k in five days. I think that's about the fastest I can ever hope to work.

Have you learned anything from this experience so far? Is there any advice you would like to share with other NaNoWriMoers?

What I've learned so far is that I think next year I'll take it a bit easier (he said, for the third year in a row). If I can make my 5-day target, I think I can finally take the chip off my shoulder.

As for advice to other WriMos, I'd say that 'week 2' (roughly 12-25k) is the hard part. It's the part where it can really pay dividends to pause, if time allows, and jot a few ideas down, whether it's for characters or events. This is the stage where you're developing from and expanding on your introduction, and planting good seeds at this point will mean never getting stuck for material in the later stages.

The other big piece of advice is that you're only in competition with yourself. Set goals based on what you know of your own ability, not what anyone else is doing.

Finally, here's an excerpt from Richard's current project. Enjoy!

Amanda finished her latest round of photos, looked up, and let out a pleased 'Ooh!' Jane followed her gaze to another narrow side street, barely visible from this angle. She set off, trying to match Amanda's stride and catch up to her at the corner, but the other woman, longer-legged, got there first by a good ten seconds.

She'd found the street she wanted. Arbour Lane, it was called, at least if Jane was making the right head or tail of the battered sign. Its paint was completely gone, leaving only sculpted, mottled rust. Not a long street, but longer than some of the linking alleys they'd walked down this afternoon. The terraces huddled close enough to the road that perspective pinched them together at the far end anyway.

And every one was boarded. Most had the gridded tin, but more than one had bits of corrugated sheet metal instead. There were loose and cracked gutters, trees growing out of chimneys, crumbling paint, crumbling brickwork. Someone had fly-tipped a pile of bin bags on one doorstep.

Halfway along, the steel door-board of one house stood ajar, its mangled catch gaping like a manta ray's mouth.

Thank you for appearing, Richard! Drop me a line and tell me if you completed your five day goal!

If you are also participating in NaNoWriMo 2014 and would like to be featured, follow the instructions on this post.

The Catalan Problem

I live in a small nation, a triangle snuggled between the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees. It's a nation of opportunities and hard-working people, a nation of traditions and old, deep roots. Its name is Catalonia.

Catalonia might be a nation, but it is not an independent state. Millions of Catalan people want to change that, and independence is a collective dream which is spreading like wildfire throughout the land. I'm not Catalan-born, but I've been a resident in Barcelona since 1996, and I can fully understand the sentiment. The relationship between Catalonia and Spain is under pressure, and has been for many, many years. So many factors come into play that they're virtually impossible to explain without turning this post into a socio-historic academic paper. I'll just comment on two of the things that are always in my mind:


Economy

Josep Desquens explains the situation quite succinctly in his article Europe's Stateless Nations in the Era of Globalization. The Case for Catalonia's Secession from Spain:

Containing about 16 percent of Spain's population, it provides about 20 percent of its GDP and one-third of the total industrial production and exports. The region contributes about 25 percent of Spain's total taxes, but public investment in Catalonia is scarce when related to either population or GDP contribution. The regionalized investment of the Spanish state in Catalonia from 1982 to 1998 represented only about 8.5 percent of the total.

So, Catalonia gives about 25% in taxes yet only receives about 9% in investments. How is the autonomous community supposed to thrive when it's being bled year after year? The quote above might make reference to the year 1998, but don't think those numbers have changed much. Worse is that some journalists and politicians have the gall to go on mass media outlets and preach "you need to show more solidarity" when Catalans demand their tax euros. It makes my already-sucked-out blood boil.


Identity

Catalan people's cultural identity has endured several crises throughout the centuries, the most recent being Franco's dictatorship. As Josep Desquens explains:

Gen. Franco's dictatorial regime is key to understanding Catalonia today. While all Spaniards were victims of Franco's ruthless and institutionalized violation of human rights, Catalonia suffered a cruel and systematic attempt at cultural annihilation. It endured repression of individual and collective cultural rights, such as the prohibition of the use of the Catalan language, the public denial of the Catalan identity and the punishment for cultural expression.

We will suffer again,
we will fight again,
we will overcome again.

Desquens is not exaggerating, trust me. Here's just one example: the president of Catalonia during the Spanish civil war, Lluís Companys, was executed in 1940 by Spanish fascists after being caught in exile by the Gestapo. Companys is the only democratically elected president in European history to be executed. His execution is a wound in Catalonia's memory, and the fact that Spain still refuses to reverse Companys's judgment only rubs in more salt.

I promised I would be brief, so I'll close my exposition here even though the topic is understandably much more complicated.

The situation now

In recent years, Catalan people have taken to the streets on the Diada or National Day (September 11) to express their desire for independence from Spain. I was there. This year, we created a giant "V", symbolizing "vote", which crossed the entire city of Barcelona in the colors of the senyera, the Catalan national flag. Almost two million people participated. Let me say that again: out of a total population of about eight million, almost two million people got together in a peaceful demonstration at the same place, same day, same time--and we lined up in order to make the senyera. It's a logistics feat and an example of what Catalans are capable of doing.

This is just one section of the demonstration.
All those red and yellow dots? People.

So where is this all leading? In a nutshell: the Catalan government announced it would hold a referendum on November 9, 2014 to decide the future of the nation. Spain banned the referendum. The Catalan government decided to keep the date and hold what it called an "unofficial poll." Spain banned the poll. What is Spain so afraid of? Mariano Rajoy, Spain's Prime Minister, claims that the Catalan government's referendum (later, "unofficial poll") goes against the Constitution. He claims he is, therefore, defending the people's constitutional rights by banning all referendums and polls.

So... Denying the people the right to vote is now called defending our constitutional rights?

Give me an effing break.

November 9 is upon us, and I can tell you what will happen: civil disobedience. I've had enough of this farce, and so have millions of Catalans. We're not talking about an isolated radical group here: we're talking about millions of people--an ample part of the nation. It's not a matter of voting yes to independence, even. It's a matter of VOTING. Vote no if you want to, but vote! Catalans have the right to freedom of speech, even if the Spanish government is doing everything in its power to deny the people that right. Luckily, the Catalan government is holding its ground.

On Sunday November 9 2014, I'm going to vote. Salva, my fiancé, is going to vote. My mother is going to vote. My coworker and close friend Marta is going to vote. Her mother is going to vote. Her brother. Her brother's friend. And so on, and so forth.

I don't know what we'll achieve, or if anyone will listen, but I do know Catalan people will fight for as long as it takes. They've already fought for three hundred years.