(I just want to start this article off by saying that the events in Connecticut, today, are absolutely horrific. Any man who makes the conscious choice to take the lives of innocent civilians is not right in the head. To shoot and kill children, however, goes far, far beyond that. It is downright inhuman and monstrous.

If you want my full views on the issue of gun control, however, I’ll point you over to Chuck Wendig. He posted his thoughts about gun control over here, which I am entirely in favor of.

I also made a follow-up comment in that same article, in case you want my view on guns in general. Anyway, back to our (not quite) regularly scheduled (and happier) programming.)

~

It’s been two weeks, to the day, since I crossed the finish line of NaNoWriMo. I got the immediate sense of joy and reward when I got the giant “Winner!” banner to greet me. Hell, I even have the little badge over to the side of this website that proves it.

What have I written since then, however? Maybe a couple hundred words.

With that in mind, in the end, I think that I failed NaNo. I’ve been rationalizing it, saying that I nearly burned myself out with the event and that I’ve just been recouping. Let’s face the facts here however, the real reward for NaNo was finding and pursuing a way to writing all the time. To that end, I think I’ve failed.

Sure, I found that word sprints and G+ Hangouts are a fantastic way to propel me. I even figured out afterward that the timer in my wrist watch was nearly just as effective as the Hangouts. I haven’t put those practices to use since then, however, and I believe that it’s killed my enthusiasm for having won.

That will be changing tonight. I’ll be posting up a text field along the side of this website, containing the word counts for all my works in progress. I’ll be writing, at the least, a thousand words a day and then updating that word count.

This, in theory, should help keep the peer pressure on by having everyone be able to monitor my status. Combined with the aforementioned wrist watch technique, and things should be flowing much more smoothly.

As far as Under A Falling Sky goes, however, things are good. The story and the characters have developed at a good, but not great, pace, and I have a clear idea on how I want to end this story. I’ve even had one or two fleeting thoughts about a follow-up story, but I promptly used a cinder block against my skull as punishment.

That said, not everything with the story is peachy. The intro and beginning area isn’t near where I want it to be in hindsight. For once, I actually made a story that starts off with too much bang in too short a span of time.

Then again, I don’t think anyone should ever expect their first draft to come anywhere close to fresh and clean. Hell, especially out of NaNo, where the word count trumps any real sense of quality. So I guess this will mean that the editing process might be longer or more intensive, but I believe that the end result will be well worth it.

Until then, however, the story must go on. Tanis Arkay and Ashayl Faeron have had enough respite since we three last got together, so it’s back to the grinder tonight.