WOO! A Character Sketch!

So you may notice a few different things on my blog. One is the obvious advertisement space to the right. What can I say? With money being so tight right now I figured why not if it'll help gain a few extra dollars?

The other exciting addition is the lovely illustration of my intended main character for this year's NaNoWriMo. This was graciously done for free by Kerynean and you should really check out her stuff! It's AMAZING! I'm hoping to put a larger version in this post if she has one for me so look for an update!

Also if you haven't looked at it yet, you should check out the new NaNoWriMo site! So far it's been faster and better than the last! So take a look and hopefully we can convince you to write with us in November! You'll also notice the cool new NaNo badge on my site for this year. So really, go check it out!

Relationship Charts or I'm Not Very Politic

As I have been looking at my NaNoWrimo novel that I wrote last year (it's still not finished) I realized that the book is turning out to have more politics than anything else I have written before. I quickly realized as I was re-reading it that I was going to need some help keeping track of my character's political machinations. To that end I posted a request on a few of my regular writer's forums as well as on NaNoWriMo forums.

I was a bit disappointed when some of the replies were sarcastically mean. In general writer's communities can be quite helpful and so I was shocked to receive such replies. Sadly it wasn't just one either. I felt like my faith was restored in the helpfulness of one writer to another when on the NaNoWriMo forums I received a post that actually helped.

Now I was never really taught to use relationship charts for drafting novels but it can be a very useful tool. Keep in mind that the one below is only an example. I'll try to remember to take a picture of my when I'm done and upload it into another post. The link I received led me to the picture below: 

So I'm not writing about the X-men but this is a great look at how a relationship chart works. Clearly the creator of this chart picked Wolverine as his starting point, just like I would choose my central character, and connected all the people that had significance to him with different colored "threads." The different colors indicate the type of relationship that they have with each person. In the end the notation is all up to you but I thought to post this in case anyone else had the same issue. I hope it helps and keep on writing!

Laptop Issues

So I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo and I realize that I haven't booted up my laptop in ages. I'm not looking forward to it since I seem to remember it running really slow the last time I did. The idea that I may have to wipe and reinstall is not appealing. I've done it a million times but now with a baby and being a full time housewife I really don't want to add something like that to my day. I was also having trouble with my desktop last night which is not making me happy either. I can't listen to a TV show and search the web at the same time without the video stalling. I've run the usual spybot and adaware and virus protection programs but nothing turned up that was really unusual. I'll have to run them in safe mode to be sure. Yay. NOT!

In other news I did start working on my characters and plot description. It's a little rocky and still a bit iffy but better than nothing!