Free Today on Amazon
Today is a very scary day for writers. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) begins at midnight tonight, which means the hours are ticking down and the time to prep your novel is coming to a close. This can be more frightening than walking through a haunted house, but fear not! I have some tricks and a very fun and useful link to share.
I’ve also included in this post a handful of horror freebies and a dealio from Amazon. You can read one of these between handing out candy to the kids.
NaNoWriMo Tricks
Winning NaNoWriMo means writing 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s possible. I’ve done it twice. Here are a few tricks I’d like to share.
One of the main goals of NaNoWriMo is to learn to turn of your internal editor and just write. This is a first draft and there is no need for it to look nice and clean. It can be as messy as a kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner. So, let’s say you write a paragraph, a page or even a chapter and you don’t like it. Don’t delete it. If you do that, you’re deleting precious words towards your word count and goal. Plus, you never know if there’s a gem of an idea that’s later worth salvaging. My method is to gray out that text rather than delete. That way, when I go back and edit, the text is marked as something I initially didn’t like.
Descriptive prose and action scenes can be difficult to write and take up valuable time. This is when you need to remember that 50K words does not mean a full manuscript. It means a first draft and getting your ideas for your novel written down. When I come to a place with action or descriptive prose, I bracket them like this:
[Describe house. It is gray and dilapidated on the outside, but nice on the inside. Very cold. Fires in the fireplaces, but no one seems to be home.]
[Karen fights the Masked Menace. MM gets the upper hands. Karen falls to the floor. Uses her feet to push MM down the stairs.]
When you go back to edit, you know what is supposed to happen and you can flesh the scene out. And, yes, these bracketed scenes are definitely to be used in your word count.
If you write speculative fiction, you can get slowed down trying to think up names. I don’t just mean people, I mean creatures, taverns, spells, countries, planets, etc. Don’t waste trying to think up the perfect name. Instead, use a placeholder. But thinking up an appropriate placeholder can waste time as well. That’s what makes Seventh Sanctum such an awesome resource.
Seventh Sanctum is a portal for all kinds of name generators. Need a name for a magic spell, a martial arts move or a type of space phenomena? Go to the appropriate generator and quickly find one that will work for now. Who knows, you may even find a keeper. Be sure to generate a list of at least 10 names to give yourself a choice.
Halloween Treats
Just so you know, I haven’t read any of these books, but they look pretty creepy and fun. All are free, except the first one, “999,” which costs $0.99. This is a great deal, considering it includes stories by authors such as Stephen King and Neil Gaiman.
999: New Stories Of Horror And Suspense Not Free. $0.99.
Award-winning writer and editor Al Sarrantonio gathers together twenty-nine original stories from masters of the macabre. From dark fantasy and pure suspense to classic horror tales of vampires and zombies, 999 showcases the extraordinary scope of fantastical fright fiction. The stories in this anthology are a relentless tour de force of fear, which will haunt you, terrify you, and keep the adrenaline rushing all through the night.
Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter by Brian P. Easton
It takes more than silver bullets to kill a werewolf. Sylvester James knows what it is to be haunted. His mother died giving birth to him and his father never let him forget it; until the night he was butchered by a werewolf–the night a full moon ruined his life. Alone in the world, Sylvester is taken in by Michael Winterfox, a Cheyenne mystic. Winterfox, once a werewolf hunter, trains the boy to be a warrior–teaching him how to block out pain, stalk, fight, and kill.
Dollhouse by Anya Allyn
Following the characters down into the creepy underground world they discover is exhilarating and absorbing. I was always wanting to know the answer to so many dark secrets. Allyn’s writing style at times reminds me of Lovecraft, managing to capture that same dread of the unknown.
The Vampire Handbook by PJ Jones
So, after a painstakingly long soul-searching (at least five minutes) and after grappling with the possible fate of your immortal soul (who cares if you’re not going to die, anyway), you’ve decided to become a vampire. Congratulations! But before beginning that dark and shadowed journey into a life of eternal damnation, every vampire is required to read THE VAMPIRE HANDBOOK, a short step-by-step guide to becoming a vampire and then adjusting to the bloodsucking lifestyle.
The Halloween Collection
The Halloween Collection showcases spooky reads from nine very different authors. Whether you enjoy light or dark paranormal, YA or adult-themed genres, there’s bound to be a story to suit your tastes
Eaters by Michelle DePaepe
Cheryl and her fiancé Mark, a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan, are on their way back to Denver after a reunion camping trip in the mountains when they receive word an epidemic is spreading like wildfire. But this is no ordinary virus. Those infected, dubbed “Eaters,” are reanimated corpses whose lust for rotten food quickly turns to an insatiable desire for human flesh. When Mark becomes infected, Cheryl is forced to venture into this insane new world on her own. Hoping to find her family still living, she strikes out on a blood-soaked journey that forges her will to survive.
Descriptions provided by Amazon
Disclaimers and Disclosures
I found these books via Amazon’s Kindle eBooks store. Resources for free Kindle and other format eBooks are listed in my sidebar.
These freebies are limited time offers, so there is no guarantee any of these books will still be free when you click on the links. Grab them sooner rather than later.
Books that I have previously listed will occasionally come up free again. I add those to my current posts for people who didn’t see them the first time.