Wednesdays Words.

Hello!
I know you all missed me while I was away. After all there's no other excuse for the fact that your lives stopped without me. LOL Yeah, right. You all but forgot me! So to make myself feel better I'm gonna say to all those that wish they had someone to do all the cooking and cleaning during the month of November.... ha ha!

Enough nonsense! This is not the time for silliness, it's serious business writing a novel in 30 days. I want no procrastinating, no web surfing, no distractions, no deviating from the course and definitely NO FUN! **screech** What? No fun? Since when is writing not fun!? Think about it. By writing you get to play God. You say when things happen, how they happen and to who they happen. You can kill someone off or give someone a baby. You can have someone enjoy the flush of new found love or the sorrow of letting love go. You decide what bad habits you hero has and whether your heroine is strong enough to stand them. And when it's all said and done you've crafted lives and a world you know better than your own, a world you've come to love. And then you get to do it all over again!

Writing for me is about passion. And no I'm not talking about the kind that happens in the bedroom, although a good amount of that is part of my writing it's not ALL of it. No, the passion I'm talking about is for your story, for your characters, for the skills it takes to craft a tale real enough to grab your reader and suck them in until they're cross-eyed at 3am because they can't put your book down. Without the passion and desire to tell your tale you can have all the skill in the world and not spin a great book. Sure it might be a good book and people might read it and enjoy it, but a great book will have them thinking about it long after they've turned the last page. They'll be talking about it to their friends and putting it on their keeper shelf to pull out over and over again. I want to write great books, I want my books to be the ones on the keeper shelves, I want to hear people talking about them. But most of all I want them to fall in love with my characters and if I don't love them that won't happen.

Passion is such a big part of it. There's the passion you have for your story, the passion your hero has for your heroine, the passion they have for their goals. And lets not forget the passion YOU have to share your story with the world. It's easy to lose sight of it when you're stuck in a scene that just won't work or you've used the same phase to describe an emotion five times on the one page. When you hit that wall or pot hole in your story that you just can't seem to get past and when you're tired and your fingers are cramped and your back aches and the number on your word count just doesn't feel like it's big enough you can easily lose the passion. So what do you do?

That's where we come in. Together we can keep the passion going because when one of us has numb legs and just can't walk anymore the rest of us will carry them. We'll reach down and grab their arms and drag them back onto their feet. We'll push them on, support them when they stumble, we'll mop up the tears and sweat, we'll pour the drinks and serve the food for thought that sparks the embers of passion and we'll damn well kick their arses over the line if we have to! If you've signed on to this with us then you need to know that we're passionate about the team. Yes we write our own stories and each of us is at a different stage but we're all after the same thing. Telling stories. Telling great stories. And I don't care who writes the story, I want to read all the good ones and I want to keep all the great ones. Most of all I want to know that I helped get those stories out there.

The writers life is a solitary one and the support and friendship of our fellow writer is just as much a resource as any how-to book you read, any research you undertake or skill you might learn. It takes a writer to understand a writer and when you shut the 'real' world out in November remember that we're just as real and always here. So when you find yourself getting cold as the flames of passion die down give us a shout, one of us will have the fuel to get the fire roaring again.

RC