Four days.
Tuesday, Stick is coming.
Also, next month happens to be National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).
Coincidentally, I wrote Stick during NaNoWriMo in 2009. Stick is a NaNoWriMo book.
I will admit that I don't have a lot of faith in planning a start date and end date for producing a novel. It's not like booking travel arrangements for an all-inclusive Caribbean vacation or something. Well, if it were like that anyone could do it and there would be a lot more terrible novels out there than there already are.
So I will say that writing Stick during NaNoWriMo was more of a coincidence than a plot.
Which brings me to another question and answer from my ecent interview. This was also a question I was asked on Sunday at the Orange County Children's Book Festival:
Q. How
do you know when it’s right to start putting the story on paper? Does something
click in your head? Does your protagonist let you know; if so, how do you
experience that release to write?
A. Usually
what happens to me is that I think holistically about the story for a very long
time, and then at some point an opening line or group of words will come to me.
Usually this happens at night when I’m lying in bed. When it does happen, and I get
these words down onto a document, the ball begins to roll and it does not stop
rolling until the work is complete.
