Choose Your Side: "Tangled Tides" Official Release Celebration

Happy Book Birthday to Tangled Tides and its fabulous author, Karen Amanda Hooper!

Yay! *throws confetti* I’m super excited for Karen. Her first book, the young adult novel Tangled Tides, officially releases today. And to celebrate and show my support/excitement, I’m participating in a war… an Underwater Web War! ;)

Tangled Tides features a variety of mystical and battling sea creatures: merfolk, selkies, sirens, and gorgons. In celebration of the book’s release, Karen is conducting an Underwater Web War between these magical sides. She says she loves them all, but she's making us choose our favorite. So... *drum-roll*

I choose…SIRENS!

The talented Alexandra Shostak created the interior artwork for Tangled Tides.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Pictures Comments - Photobucket

Just wanted to wish all my friends, family, fellow bloggers, and readers a "Happy Thanksgiving"! (And if you're not in the Untied States, then "Happy Thursday"!)

Please stay safe in your travelings and your cooking. Remember to give thanks, and enjoy your family and friends during this holiday time. =D

~Namárië

(Elvish Farewell)

P.S. Come back tomorrow to join in the fun and celebration in honor of the Tangled Tides official release day!

NaNoWriMo Update

I've been a bad blogger neglecting my poor little blog these past two weeks. The reason...NaNoWriMo! In my last post I explained about my word goals and a brief synopsis of my story. I'm happy to report that besides deciding on a working title ("Source & Sacrifice") that things are going well. I've been not only hitting, but surpassing my daily word goals almost every day this month. By the end of week 2 (which was today), I had hoped to be at 26,000 words. I'm ahead of schedule with just over 29,000! =) The month isn't even halfway over and I'm already to passed the halfway word mark. Huzzah! At this current rate, I should be able to complete at least the 50,000 words by the Thanksgiving holidays, which is good since on that Thursday any writing time will be nonexistent.

Originally I wanted to "win" NaNoWriMo (i.e. make it to 50k words) just to see if I could. It was a personal challenge. And while that is still my main motivation, I have found another "driving force" to push me to finish. NaNoWriMo has various sponsors that support them and offer discounts to the NaNo participants and winners. Last year I didn't really pay attention to the winner prizes and special offers, but this year I decided to look into them and a few writing programs caught my eye. I've always just used Microsoft Word because it was handy, simple, and I understand the format. But I was curious about these other writing programs so I thought I'd look into them more.

It Has Begun...

So as I mentioned earlier, I'm participating in NaNoWriMo once again this year. Last year was my first time doing it and I had a lot of fun. I didn't make it to the 50,000 word goal, but I didn't expect to make it, so I was thrilled with hitting about 35,000. This year however I want to make it to the 50K mark...mostly just to see if I can.

To help myself get in the mood to write, I've decided to attend more write-ins this year. The first one of the month (at least for my local area) was a midnight write-in at Dragon's Lair (comic book shop). I enjoyed it, meet some new people, and had a rather productive two hours. I wrote over 2000 words! O.O Woo-hoo! I need to write at least 1666 words a day to finish by November 30th, but I'm shooting for a daily word goal between 1800 - 2000 per day. (That way I can make it to the 50K mark faster and not panic on that last day.) So I'm off to a good start for now...