SpecFicNZ Blogging Week – Day 2, superhero novels

I have recently read "Soon, I will be INVINCIBLE!" by Austin Grossman, a fun jaunt into superhero novels. I enjoyed it enough that I decided that it would be my genre for November's Nanowrimo novel.

If any genre defies Specfic boundaries and bleeds between sci-fi, fantasy and horror, it's superhero novels. A woman in a high tech battle suit teams up with an alien gladiator to fight a villain using an ancient Babylonian artifact to kill the Prime Minister of Uruguay for his own evil plans. What a lovely combination!

I think I'll enjoy November - I have never written in that genre and I am a huge comic book fan. There is so much material to choose from and so many directions it can go. I can do almost pure fantasy or pure sci-fi or a combination, introduce vampires or werewolves, have sorcerers turning the streets of New York into a replica of ancient Greece and have it all observed by an immortal alien sent to earth to observe, but who feels the need to interfere.

Indeed - very fun November. I think I'm excited enough to do the Kiwiwriters Prep-challenges in the archive before November.

SoCNoC - halfway mark

I hit the halfway point with SoCNoC (Southern Cross Novel Challenge) last night. That means I've written 25k words so far in June and am just one day behind the expected pace.

Here's how I got there:

day date total today
1 01/06/10 1694 1694
2 02/06/10 3615 1921
3 03/06/10 5352 1737
4 04/06/10 6197 845
5 05/06/10 6829 632
6 06/06/10 8861 2032
7 07/06/10 9741 880
8 08/06/10 11597 1856
9 09/06/10 13342 1745
10 10/06/10 15736 2394
11 11/06/10 16755 1019
12 12/06/10 19205 2450
13 13/06/10 20068 863
14 14/06/10 21301 1233
15 15/06/10 23511 2210
16 16/06/10 25096 1585


Not exactly stellar, but despite being a little lazy, I've managed to stay only one day behind every day. I keep telling myself that I'll catch up on a weekend day. Maybe this weekend. :(

Good luck to all the other SocNoCers and HalfNoCers out there - I hope you're having a great June.

Kiwiwriters returns!

Far less mysteriously than it disappeared, Kiwiwriters is back up and running, albeit with old data.

If you've joined the site since September, please create a new log-in account. I just realized that this is perfect if you were unhappy with your original username. Now's the chance to fix it!

And, if you haven't thought about any writing for the new year, may I suggest the 20k Novella challenge we are offering for January?

Kiwiwriters disaster!

Well, for the last week or so, Kiwiwriters has been completely down and out. Go to the link and nothing - just an error.

Now, since getting in touch with the hosting company, we realize that it's even worse than we thought. Not only is the current page no longer working because of a hardware problem on their main server, the backups are also corrupt.

The latest full backup that we have is from September! That's over THREE months old!

So, blog posts, discussion boards, news items, challenges, membership data etc.. etc... are all gone.

This entry is just to let you know, if you are a recent member, you will have to re-join kiwiwriters, since your username and passwords are all missing.

Sorry guys.

Kiwiwriter's collection has arrived in the post

I've been involved with Kiwiwriters since its founding. My participation lately has waned, but every once in a while, I throw out an idea, usually just for the name of a challenge (the zing thing, the collection challenge).

The Collection Challenge finished months ago, but there was lots of work after that to organize a printed book (fantastic work from Cassie and Kerryn by the way) and getting the PDF file together, the introduction and the cover designed etc... It eventually went on sale at lulu, a self publishing site.

Cassie Hart, Kerryn Angell and guest judge Philippa Ballantine went to work and the end result was "The Challenge Collection", which I ordered as soon as possible and got in the mail recently (while I was on holiday actually, so I had to wait another week!).

While you can buy it, you can also download the collection for free. Check it out here.

I bought two copies - one for myself and another for putting into the Wellington City Library.

SoCNoC is over until next year

I hit 50,294 words by about 11PM on June 28th, a couple of days ahead of deadline!

This novel is about the far future in New Zealand. It's a dystopian sci-fi where different species of humans war with each other and live their difficult lives. The machines play an important role, and interact with the different species in mysterious ways that no one seems to understand.

I've enjoyed writing about the ruins of Wellington, the odd church in the wilds around Nelson, the b-mod city around Napier and the g-mod military installation in the bay of islands.

I still have a few thousand words to write to finish my story. Then, let it sit and edit it later, maybe sometime next month.

Thanks to everyone at kiwiwriters for the encouragement, and congratulations to all those other winners. It's been a great month to write a novel!

I'm looking forward to SoCNoC next year. I'm sure it will do nothing but grow each year.

SoCNoC has begun!

I did a midnight start on SoCNoC (the Southern Cross Novel Challenge) last night. I managed to get in about 1300 words and continued this morning and got my quota. I will continue today and try and get a head start going into the weekend. It's a long way to 50,000 words, but making my quota every day will do it nicely, even if I'm more ambitious than that.

If I can get 10,000 words by Monday, I will be very happy and well on my way. It would be better to get even more, but considering how much I'm struggling with the current storyline (it feels like it's going quite slow), I'd be surprised if I got over 10k over the weekend.

Still - very exciting and I'm wondering where my story will go in the end. I've only sketched out the world roughly and some of the characters.

I have gone away from the first contact/telepath story, to a different one which I did on the kiwiwriters easter challenge. That story, which was never finished, is almost exactly like my current novel.

It is set in an alien land (I think it's New Zealand 1000 years from now), with many types of humans roaming around and big, mechanical creatures that aren't so friendly any more. Oh yeah, and there are packs of wild dogs all over the place. What would your pet do if all the people went away?

Signed up for SoCNoC 2007

What are you doing this June? Me, I'm writing my 2nd novel.

Seeing as Nanowrimo happens in November, just when the weather is getting more and more like summer, Kiwiwriters decided to set up a novel challenge more in line with the Southern Hemisphere. So, June it is.

50,000 words and a massive rush of accomplishment, Kiwiwriters brings you SoCNoC, "The Southern Cross Novel Challenge".

Here is my participation certificate... I'm sincerely hoping for a winner's certificate at the end of June!



I highly recommend that you join us. Good luck!

Cartoon Entry in Cartoon challenge

I created a cartoon challenge on the kiwiwriters page.

Here is my entry.



copyright Travis Cottreau, 2007

Dialog font: "Steel City Comic" by John Greyson.

wwwW - the end?

I finished my 7500 words for the Waitangi Weekend Word Wace (wwwW) on the kiwiwriters site. I was luke warm about the progress and as I've already said, I struggled to finish.

We do get cool icons for finishing though. Here's mine:


When I say "finish", I don't mean finish my story, oh no, I mean finish my 7500 words in 4 days, which is a completely different thing.

So, there is more work to finish, and I'm not sure how I'm going to end it. I have a few ideas, but maybe I'll heap a little more trouble onto the main character and see if he comes out the other side.

New writing resource page

It was the end of November, Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) was almost over and a small group of Wellington writers got together to celebrate the insanity of writing 50,000 words in one month.

As it turns out, we got along so well that we decided we have to extend this insanity, we have to share it with the rest of the world, well, the southern hemisphere anyway. November was over - long live November!

So, like gears turning, our little minds went to work, scheming and plotting, planning and organizing, making check lists and checking them off, putting notches on our bedposts, creating a googlegroup and buying a domain name.

Two months later, we have a new web page ready to unveil! Muahahahaah... it's alive! It's alive!

The goal of this page: Nanowrimo has been so good to us, why have that feeling confined to November? We are gradually adding functionality to the page to let members issue writing challenges to everyone interested. The site will have "official" challenges like weekend short story writing (Waitangi Weekend Word Wace this weekend) to a full, Nanowrimo like novel writing contest in June ( Southern Cross Novel Challenge or SocNoc for short), but the real fun is in issuing your own challenge and seeing how everyone does and how many people you can get to join you! Want to write a travel guide for Palmerston North? Want to write that love letter to your partner that you've been putting off? Why not make it official and get other people to spread the love?

Join us in craziness, join us in fun - for whatever reason, please join us at kiwiwriters.org