Red Room Where the Writers Are

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60,000 words later, and 30 days passed, the whirl-wind that is NaNoWriMo is finished.   My story went through so many different unplanned twists & permutations, that I hardly remember what was part of the original outline and what was just thrown in there because of mad bouts of scrambled editing and arc-spinning.

The bottom line is, however, that I successfully WON NaNoWriMo.  I'm pretty happy with the novel, despite the fact that it will require a ton of editing, and possibly even a complete re-write of the ending (I really wasn't happy with the way the ending came together).  The story has a lot of continuity issues, which is probably due to the fact that I added so many details that weren't in my original outline, that things got very muddy towards the 30,000 word mark.

NaNoWriMo is really Novel Writing by attrition.  Whether you like the product or not, at that time, you forge ahead just to keep your word count up, and worry about the edits later.  By the end of it, your brain is mush, and the thought of being creative is the last thing on your mind.  All you want to do is get your life back.  However, I am still very happy with my results, and will dive into the 2nd draft in the new year.

Now!  On to Ficlets.

Ficlets is an online social community that was developed by AOL for writers.  It restricts the authors stories to 1024 characters long, and encourages participatants to give other authors instant feedback on their stories.  Commenting on other people's works is the essential backbone of what FICLETS represents.  

Since joining, only 6 short months ago, i'd written over 220 ficlets stories and received a ton of feedback that, I believe, improved my writing a great deal.  IT's put me in touch with many other amateur writers like me, and allowed me to create short stories by writing ficlets in series with some of the brightest writers there.

On January 15th, Ficlets will disappear from the "Inter-Weeb", as AOL decided it can no longer support something which brings in no revenue.  I understand the reasoning behind such a move by AOL, but it still saddens me that this outlet for pure unadultrated creation is being taken away.  I've been informed by some of the original developers of Ficlets (No longer @ AOL) that another Ficlets 2.0 is in the works.  The new Ficlets-Type community website will be similar in format, but far different in its features (to avoid lawsuits and licensing fees, no doubt).    This light at the end of the proverbial tunnel gives me hope that I may, once again, be able to see the same ol' names writing 1024 characters of enlightened goodness.

 I've managed to back up most of my stories from Ficlets and will be publishing them here for everyone to read, and in the true spirit of Ficlets, allow everyone to critique and comment upon them.  Reading one takes 30 seconds, so feel free to view my collection and enjoy the word-spinning!