Great Reads to Unwind, post NaNo

I'm already compiling a great reading list to chill out and refresh the soul after NaNoWriMo is over. Here's what I have planned for the month of December. Anybody read these?

Came in the mail today:

1) Salvage the Bones, National Book Award Winner for fiction, 2011. A 14-year-old narrator during Hurricane Katrina.
2) Chime: Y/A, also a NBA nominee. Mystery, fantasy, and witchcraft.

On my Kindle, waiting:

3) The Tiger's Wife. Another NBA nominee. Adult (?) fiction by a twentysomething Yugoslavian prodigy.

4) Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I admit to having already started this one, and I'm dying laughing. Queer teens, depression, and how not to get your heart broken.

On my bedside table, waiting:

5) Wildwood. By Decembrists singer-songwriter Colin Meloy. I've read the first few pages of this already. Narrator's baby brother is abducted by "a murder of crows" on the first page. Did you know a flock of crows is called a "murder?" Seriously. This is just my cup of tea.

Also on my bedside table, waiting:
6) A pile of New Yorkers a mile high.

Recommendations, friends? What are you planning to read, come December, 2011, to round off your year?
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! And, for added inspiration, Decembrists' follies:

Plotting the Second Half, Pt. 3

If you've been following this blog you've probably realized that I have slowed waaaay down on my posts, and I have NaNoWriMo to blame for it. I whizzed along for the first ten days thinking I could toss off this little 50,000-word exercise without breaking a sweat. When I hit mid-point in the novel those 1667 words per day began to come a lot harder.

Third Act Doldrums
So I called up a lady who knows a thing or two about plotting. Jamie Morris runs the Woodstream Writers Group in north Florida. I put the question to her: In a four-act structure, what the hell is supposed to happen in Act 3? Your character has bottomed out. She has to make it from that deep hole to the climax. Additionally, we're supposed to be right in the middle of "fun and games" as Blake Snyder puts it in his excellent book on plotting screenplays, Save the Cat. Where's my fun? Where's my games?

Here's what Jamie had to say:

Plotting the Second Half, Pt 2: The Mavens Weigh In

Yup, bad sh*t happens in Act 3

Yesterday we talked a little about issues with plotting your novel's second half. I'm using a four-act structure rather than a three-act, and I'm a little concerned with how I'm going to keep the tension in my WIP from flat-lining after the midway point. So I got in touch with two of my fiction mentors, Jamie Morris and Joyce Sweeney, who invented the Plot Clock I'm using. Today I'll give you Joyce's take on this brain-teaser (look for Jamie's words of wisdom tomorrow).

Sweeney, being all
smart and stuff

Joyce says that the low point in the story comes at the end of Act 2 in both the four- and three-act models. After your character hits that low point, "it doesn't mean all the tension is over, you keep raising the stakes all the time," she says.

Plotting the Second Half

Halfway through:
But what's on the dark side?

I've burnt up the first half of my WIP at a rate I'd never imagined possible during NaNoWriMo. But just as I'm about to reach what I've plotted as the low point (the worst that could happen) I feel myself getting nervous about what's to come.

In the plotting workshop I took in September, we talked about how the halfway point of a novel can be the place where your main character hits bottom. Hits it so hard you can hear the thud a hundred miles. Just after that point, your MC realizes she has to change. Something she's doing isn't working. She figures that out. Once she does, she's on an upswing, piling up small victories and realizing new strengths, until the novel's climax (the battle of the book.)

Fine so far, but how do you keep tension in your novel when your character is racking up the smaller victories, and those leading to larger ones, and it looks like all is well?

Speaking of Word Count: A Query Conundrum

Using method pictured above, my novel's
word count is 7,986,000. Is that too long?

Naturally since I'm doing NaNoWriMo, word counts are on my mind. I'm using my Scrivener program, which has a nifty little feature: At the bottom of the screem there's a scrolling word count, so I can watch it tick along while I'm typing. I can sort of experience my word count in real time. It's just so Meta-NaNo.

Here we are at Day Three, and I've managed to write 1672, 1791, and 1831 words per day, all by 10 a.m. I'm praying I won't jinx my mad productivity, but if I manage to pound out 50,000 words this month, I'm going to owe a few people. Like one of my teachers, Joyce Sweeney, who ran a plotting workshop in September, in time to ensure I had a solid outline and synopsis come November 1. Whoo, what a difference a plan makes! With synopsis in hand, I feel like I could whip out a 976-page masterpiece. Let me pull out my battered copy of Anna Karenina and swear on it: I shall never pants again, so help me Gaddis.

(And spending 30 minutes in the afternoon making notes toward tomorrow's writing hasn't hurt so far, either).

But I had another pressing question about word-counts, re: Querying.