Brooke E. Wayne: Romance with a Kiss of HumorLeave a comment

What I Got out of my First #NaNoWriMo Experience

What I Got Out of my First #NaNoWriMo Experience

I started prepping for my first National Novel Writing Month in mid-October by gathering research and summarizing my chapters and scenes. A little here, a little there, until I had a 38-page word doc outline to run with come November 1st.

I wanted to participate by the rules 100%:

  • Writing Everyday
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  • Logging in and recording my progress
  • Earning my badges for participation as I go
  • Tweeting regularly on the #NaNoWriMo hashtag on Twitter @brookeewayne
  • And keeping to the Nov 1st as word-one rule

In the end, it took me twenty-three days to write a 53,838-word novel, sticking to my outline about 95% of the time.

I found it difficult to get started even though I had everything in place. The words just wouldn’t flow at times as easily as I had hoped despite all the prepping I had done to keep that from happening.

LESSON LEARNED: That setback reinforced my belief that no matter what, no matter when, if the inspiration strikes and the words begin to flow, WRITE THEM DOWN! Don’t let the moment pass believing it will return when the ‘time is right’. It won’t.

The pressure of meeting a deadline of 50,000 words in 30 days wore on my nerves harder than I thought it would at first. As soon as I passed the 50K threshold, I could literally feel my shoulders relax when I was typing. Weird.

LESSON LEARNED: When I’m faced with publishing deadlines someday, I need to brace myself for the inevitable psyching-out that will occur. Cue husbandry duties of nightly back massages…happy wife-happy life.

When I rounded the halfway point, I found my stride.

LESSON LEARNED: Keep moving forward, fighting, clawing, and forcing the words out like you’re digging out of your own grave because you will break through.

I also fought the urge to go back and edit, delete, revamp, and mess with the story every step of the way. I even forced myself to wait until the end to run spell check. Yeah, that took a good twenty minutes of my life away.

LESSON LEARNED: I need to go back. I just do. I have to fuss with the way things are written a little before moving on. Not major editing, just, you know, getting that voice down that drives the story. Every word should matter, right? Not doing that along the way made moments of writing forward feel like I was walking on broken glass.

In the end, a story that had begun as an Adult Rom-Com spoof on an 80s throwback story pieced together from actual events in my HS days emerged as a viable YA novel that I am definitely going to polish after it marinades for a couple of months. And I will pitch it alongside the Adult MS I have out now still surviving in the trenches of querying-round-one.

Between now and the revision period, I’m continuing the practice of writing everyday–specifically, I am going to write a sequel to my queried MS. My “break” from writing yesterday that I allotted myself still yielded three sentences to that story already underway just to keep to my promise.

I am proud that I pushed myself to write a second full MS and even more proud that I wrote it through NaNoWriMo, challenging myself when life was ridiculously cluttered with progress reports, parent-teacher conferences, a sinus infection piggybacking the cough & cold flu, while others in my family were tossing their cookies with the stomach flu, and even adding an afterschool club I had decided to run two days a week.

Of all the lessons learned, I discovered I could handle a lot in a short amount of time without going completely crazy.

Brooke E. Wayne: Romance with a Kiss of HumorLeave a comment

Hearts and Flowers (Poetry)

Hearts and Flowers

By

Brooke E. Wayne

Tonight we ride the wild bull with wild flowers in my hair,

And a whirlwind of impatience reaches a calmness,

Through misty waters pressed with fog,

From a lingering dream some time before.

Let our minds wander,

Never too far from home,

And journey beyond that precious place

We once believed would keep us forever.

And all that we feel will be reflected in our eyes,

Surrounding our laughter,

Expressed within our presence

As we smile blindly beyond the sun

Like children,

Gazing into Heaven with thanksgiving.

We are and were before we knew—

Destiny held us in His hands.

For God’s breath is inside our souls

To carry us into Eternity, long after our time,

Well spent,

Has cast shadows on any doubt drifting in from the past.

For in His eyes we are one—

Flesh of my flesh

As we have promised to be together.

Amidst any garden of roses,

Your love is purer than the rain that feeds the stems.

For I am merely one petal,

Capturing the dew of angel’s tears

Like liquid kisses trickling down my neck.

The colors, never muted within your smile,

Glow brightly in my eyes as we look upon the future.

I see Heaven

Surrounding a place in our dreams,

Where simple pleasures, unfolding in our love,

Once sacrificed their time.

Our lives entwined—

Yielding to moments impressed into our hearts.

We saunter, hand in hand, along our deserted shore,

Underneath that silver tapestry

With clouds strewn across an indefinite blue

Like islands in the sky.

And when this world has withered us,

We will walk on into the Light.

For time will have passed through our blood,

And the years will have been but a song

On the tongue of our Creator.

I wrote this when I was 18 years old–in pen from beginning to end with zero editing, and I haven’t changed a single word or grammatical faux pas since.

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It’s been well over twenty years later, and I still look at this poem as an anthem of love in my life. It tells the imagined story of true love from the ‘wedding night’ until ‘death do us part’. Not too bad for a teenager who knew nothing of love at the time I scratched it out on a piece of binder paper in my bedroom one night. I borrowed my simile, ‘like liquid kisses trickling down my neck,’ for the novel I’ve recently completed. The line whispers to me on Page 2 as a little secret that I’m letting you in on—a journey that I am still traversing as a writer of romance, bending my path into a full circle that will keep tumbling towards traditional publication one day.

PS.  I took the picture, and yes, my cupcake was delicious!  Happy Valentine’s Day,

xox Brooke E. Wayne xox

Brooke E. Wayne: Romance with a Kiss of Humor

Living Present Tense

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I tend to live in the Future. Most people live in the Past. Not me. I plan for everything with my endless To-Do Lists and fine-tuned Schedule of Events Calendar. There is always something happening soon, and, I assure you, I have meticulously prepped for its arrival. But, sometimes, things don’t quite go as planned.

A couple of weeks ago, I had bought a box of macarons and a bottle of pink ‘champagne’–both prominent elements in my novel that I’m about to pitch. My plan was to partake of these scrumptious delectables as soon as I finished editing the novel in its entirely–query and synopsis included–in about a week per said scheduled event.

Then, I did something yesterday that I had to do. I departed from Scrivener and took on Microsoft Word for Mac to satisfy a particular submission requirement. Now, if you have no idea what Scrivener is, then jump to the next paragraph, but, if you do, then, you know. Oh. How. You. Know. It’s the most genius and complicated friend or foe known to any writer. In summary, the export did not go well.

After shedding a few tears from battling saving and renaming the file, bizarre margins, and pop-ups that made no sense to me–just to name a few angsts–I clamped my computer shut and sent it up stairs to serve a time out for the rest of the night. Instead of sulking about possibly missing my deadline because of the countless hours I would need to wade though instructional videos to figure out how to fix my growing list of problems, I decided to live in the Present Tense.

I marched into the kitchen, grabbed the box of macarons, started passing them around to my family like a fish monger, and handed over the bottle of ‘champagne’ for my husband to uncork for me. It was time to celebrate. It didn’t matter that things weren’t going as planned to me anymore. I was done. Maybe my manuscript still had some editing needs and creating a .docx submittal was going to provide me with all kinds of valuable lessons in patience to solve them in my near Future, but, nonetheless, I was finished, and I had been for weeks. Why hadn’t I acknowledged it, yet? What was I waiting for?

The future is always going to be out of reach for me, yet I still clamor towards it with my explicit plans. But, yesterday, I went all spontaneous on myself, and, by the end of the night, I was laughing instead of crying. Maybe the ‘champagne’ helped, but still. We had a party, and it couldn’t have come at a better time than in the Present Tense.