Can’t talk now. NaNoWriMo.
Total word goal: 55,000 – 70,000
Word goal for November: 50,000
Words written so far: 37,723!!
Guys! I am killing it! At this rate I will definitely be finishing the first draft before December. This has been even way more fun than I thought!
See my stats here: https://nanowrimo.org/participants/val-manwill/novels/the-other-five-percent/stats
See what my book is about here: The Other Five Percent
Ever since I started writing this horror short story, strange things have been happening to me.
The very first night that I even began outlining… something really creepy happened. A sound came over my baby monitor. A high-pitched trill that sounded like someone screaming. Dan and I just stared at each other like… whaaaaaaaaat is that?? It had never done anything like that before or anything since… I didn’t tell Dan that I was working on a ghost story at the time and tried to pretend like it wasn’t the creepiest thing ever.
After the baby monitor thing, I tried to listen to music when I worked on the story. But the music would inexplicably turn itself on and off.
Then, one night I had a vivid nightmare that I was lying on the floor of my apartment and couldn’t get up. This weirdly-lit guy was standing by the wall, grinning at me. He slowly came closer and closer to my face. I woke up gasping and thrashing my arms trying to push him away. Dan calmed me down. The next day the light had burnt out in the spot the man had “stood” in my nightmare.
After I had written the story and revised it. I was cleaning a bottle for my son at the kitchen sink when I saw a man in a blue jacket walk across my backyard. Thinking it was my husband I dashed to the other window to wave hi… no one was there. And I know, because I frantically checked ALL of my windows and EVERY inch of my backyard.
I finally finished revising the darn story. Good. I exited completely out of Word. And I started to play around on the internet… when the thing RE-OPENED ITSELF onto my computer. I think I wrote a ghost story that in and of itself became haunted.
So… anyone want to read it?
Ava, a true skeptic, has no problem cleaning and closing The Redd’s Theater by herself at night… even though it is said to be haunted by a magician who murdered his wife there. 5,000 words
If you are brave enough to challenge the haunted ghost story, you can fill out the application below and I will email it to you. (All I ask in return is that you tell me what you thought of it.) HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
If you had told me this was how my new project announcement was going to go, I would’ve told you NO. That is NOT my plan. But you know what? When you’re a creative person, sometimes you don’t have a choice. And I know that sounds completely psychotic… and it totally is. But it’s almost like your own heart holds you hostage and you cannot freaking help yourself.
I finished writing the final episode of my TV show last month. It took a full year and a LOT of work. Really. A lot. FOR MONTHS I had been so excited to finally be able to move on to this other project (more on this in a sec). But the very day that I finished the show, my mind ran away with the idea… that “Identity Crisis” needs to be turned into a novel.
Almost 100% of my beta readers have asked me about making a novel out of it. And I mildly toyed with the idea. I knew if I did, it would have to be a TOTAL re-write. The completed series follows my life almost exactly, but for a book version I would prefer it to be cover to cover fictional. Mostly, because hey man… if I’m going to put in the work to write a dang novel, I’m going to put in the work to dang publish it, that’s what! And I ain’t about to publish an autobiography yet.
I was not able to turn off the creative faucet with this idea. I mean it was the kind of idea that keeps you up at night. So I caved and sat down to do a complete brain dump. And you know what happened? The entire outline erupted out onto the page.
That coupled with an outpouring of positive feedback from a Facebook post about the series… I was like, okay… This is what needs to be worked on right now.
So, with that unnecessarily long backstory out of the way!
Yes. I will be re-writing Identity Crisis as a YA Contemporary novel! Woo hoo! The title of the novel will be “The Other Five Percent”. It’s about a girl who has her heart broken and rebels by trying to ruin her reputation in a predominantly conservative high school. (Sorta like “Freaks and Geeks” if it were set in suburban Utah…)
My plan for this book is to try for the traditional publishing route. Personally for me, that’s a dream that I want to see realized at some point in my life.
I’m also doing this book for NaNoWriMo, because I’m a crazy person.
What’s NaNoWriMo? Oh, National Novel Writing Month? Don’t worry, it’s just this little thing where you write a 50,000 word novel in a 30 FREAKING DAYS. This is my first time trying it out. I don’t even know what to expect, but it’s a good way to puke out the first draft of my book.
I’m still not giving up on the project that I was planning on announcing today.
Here and there and in between (but don’t ask me when) I will also be working on a collection of horror stories that together I’m referring to as “The Doubting Shadow”.
Six different women are forced to face their social insecurities by increasingly bizarre and eerie circumstances. Eventually, they come to realize that their greatest fears are only a shadow of something worse.
Although, I feel that the stories would do well in a collection together, I’ll most likely be breaking them up and selling them out individually. It’s just a lot easier to market that way. Maybe one day I’ll be able to put out “The Doubting Shadow”, but right now I want to focus on a novel that I can debut with.
No worries, you can still expect these weird little stories to trickle out over the next couple of years.
Keep tuning in for more development on these projects! And you can always peruse my “projects page” if you feel like it.
valmanwill.com 