ieva melgalve

The ending of Newil is approaching. There are several problems with that. 1. My Muse is now really, really easy sidetracked. Yeah, you. Look at me, babe, not at that next project you want to be starting. 2. I have no idea what sort of ending do I have (although just yesterday I added one [...]

Finally, I realized that I couldn’t take work any more and took a 2-week long vacation. This resulted in the mental equivalent of having my head smacked with a hammer (Tom&Jerry style): I suddenly lost half of my mental capacity because I figured I don’t need to think any more. I’m fine now, I think, [...]

I just hit a slow few days in my NaNo novel (normally, I would have stopped writing altogether at this point, but not with NaNo). So at first I tried some tricks and then realized what it was really about. So the tips part. 1. Figure out whether everything is too easy, then change it [...]

The benefits of NaNoWriMo Not surprisingly, every November somebody (a lot of somebodies, actually) starts sniggering and/or demeaning the whole event. Sometimes, it’s fun and to the point (I just set this as my desktop background), sometimes it’s plain mean and condescending. So that got me thinking, not really about stopping writing but about the [...]

I have been doing well, this far, on Newil. It took a lucky combination of my night owl nature and lil one’s kindergarten that started on November 1st, so now she goes to sleep at a more predictable time, and I have an hour to write after both kids are asleep. It doesn’t sit well [...]

Yesterday, I was to my local NaNo kick-off party. Our ML & friends had done a magnificent job, making a lot of giveaway presents (I especially love the calendar for November and can’t wait to look at the quotes in the little pockets). Also, I had a nightmare tonight, reminding me that the Bloodless are [...]

I’ve done almost zero planning for more than a week, but at least I am at the very happy stage of getting ready for writing when everything seems to contribute to the novel. Ie yesterday I stumbled upon transhumanism, which seems to pretty much deal with the main conflicts in Newil. (I am, yet again, [...]

My Trusted reader and friend Russell arrived in Riga on Friday, and this is the first day when I actually have enough time and energy to post something. He’s just as great in person as in e-mails and Skype (really, need I have worried?). Also, I have almost finished the Flowers (will restart working on [...]

All this weekend I have been planning extensively, and right now I am feeling pretty good about all this NaNoWriMo thing. A fun, self-paced, moderately relaxed worldbuilding is much like what I guess fitness should be like: adding to places which felt too thin, getting the tangles out and reshaping plot lumps to more manageable, [...]

Today, I started planning NaNoWriMo. It seems that I’m going with Newil after all–a decision that surprised me both because it came so easily and because it seems WAY too hard to pull off. I started with a sentence for the plot, and three sentences for the three sons of God. (Yes, capital G, since [...]