Kristin Wolden Nitz

Category: First Drafts

  • Blog Hop!

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    I’d like to thank Ann Finkelstein for asking me to participate in this blog hop. I’ve been neglecting my blog, and this gave me a reason to get back to it. Ann is a talented writer and photographer whose YA fantasy is now out on submission. You can read about her writing process here.   I’m…

  • 23,333 Words

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    Lots of writers work faster than I do.  Plenty of my Facebook friends will regularly post one or two thousand words a day, and they’ll do this day after day.  In fact, Stephen King thinks people are serious slackers if they don’t get three to five thousand words down. I’m just excited that I’ve finally…

  • Saying “No” to NaNoWriMo

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    Thousands upon thousands of writers are gearing up for National Novel Writing Month where the goal is to produce at least 50,000 words of a first draft.  It’s described as Thirty days and nights of literary abandon. I won’t be joining them.  And it’s not just because I’m in the middle of finishing the latest round of revisions to Calyn’s…

  • Some thoughts on writing from Donna Jo Napoli

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    I’ve been collecting quotes from writers and editors for the past 18 years or so.   In fact, I just delivered a talk at the Michigan SCBWI’s fall conference on Mackinac Island that shared the quotes that I’ve been collecting for the past 18 years.  I had about two pages worth of them from various events…

  • Writing A Thousand Words A Day?

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    Some of my agency sibs are annoyingly  astonishingly prolific.  They add thousands of words a day and post totals on Facebook.  I cheer in their comments section because I am honestly delighted that their words are piling up. But there is that grumpy little envious corner of my brain that’s jealous, jealous, jealous even though I understand that…

  • Characters Who Are Too Dumb to Live

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    As I might have mentioned before, one of the tricky things about writing in the suspense/mystery/thriller genre is ensuring that your characters aren’t too dumb to live.  There has to be a reason for them to keep their deadly secrets or roam through dangerous places.  In fact, there was one series of books by a mystery…

  • Escape from the Seiser Alm!

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    My characters and I have been trapped up on the Seiser Alm for weeks now. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful place to be. I’ve enjoyed the research. But today, I decided that I had to break out. After studying pictures and video from the web–not to mention our old photo albums, I knew…

  • Over 11,000

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    I’m finally digging in again on PORTRAIT.  This week I managed to pull together over a thousand words.  It really shouldn’t be that difficult.  I try not to get jealous when my Facebook friends manage to pull together three or four thousand words a day.  But one of the problems with this chapter is that…

  • Another Blank Book

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    Back in March, I opened up a fresh blank book that I’d gotten for Christmas last year and started scribbling away on what I’d been calling the Italian chase novel.  The black and white cloth cover was attractive enough. I would have been happy to scritch-scratch away on all of my outlines and extremely rough…

  • Over 5000 Words Already?

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    Kristin Wolden Nitz
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    In general, I tend to work quite slowly.  Dialgoue might flow easily, but then I have to smooth all of the details that bring a story to life with action, description and movement.  That’s why I’m just a bit surprised to discover that I’m about 5600 in.  The first chapter is fairly polished. The second has…