NaNo Day 20

We are a third of the way through the month already and it’s hard to believe it sometimes. While it feels like I’ve been writing forever and with over 62k words, it’s probably a pretty accurate assessment of how I feel. But I’m still behind and continuing to fall even further behind as I keep writing just over 1667 words a day right now.

There is some good news in the coming week. Since I normally work on Thursdays I get two days off in a row because of Thanksgiving. And considering that I plan to keep the face stuffing to a minimum this year, I shouldn’t succumb to the food coma that comes from the big feast. With any luck I can bang out 10k on Thursday and 10k on Friday (and make at least on Friday this month live up to a day off standard).

While I did spend a few minutes last night writing a short story for my Fantasy world, I have returned to the Space Opera 3000 today. I’m going to try and ignore the fact that some of my science might be a bit on the shoddy side and just promise myself that I can go back and fix it later once I start reading up on things in December. So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that I can quell that inner editor for just ten more days.

Now it’s time to get back to writing so that I can at least hit 1667 words today, so I won’t feel like a complete failure.

Good News/Bad News

If you go by actual NaNo goals and then double it, since I’m working on a second novel, I’m spot on. Today’s goal is to have 30,000 words written. I’m just shy of 60,000 right now, and will probably hit it once I go back to writing. And if I manage to catch up to my actual goal, I’d hit 100,000 two days before the end of the month, which means I can go back to the first novel and flesh it out more.

The bad news is, that I totally didn’t come close to writing 3k today. Write-ins seem to be getting even more chatty as more and more people hit the 50k mark early, which means that if I continue to go to them, I’m going to have to spend a lot of the rest of my free time writing to catch up to my goal. Which also means I probably won’t get to watch some of my favorite shows till the month is over.

So, the plan of attack tomorrow is to get up early, grab a bowl of cereal and park my butt in the chair and write. Then, hopefully, after a few hours of writing I will head over to a early showing of Harry Potter with my lovely mother. And since we will most likely get there fairly early, I will be toting my netbook with me so I can get some more writing time while we wait to get into the theater. After that I’ll probably go to lunch somewhere with my mother, where I may also try and sneak in a few words, but probably really won’t. Then it’s back home to write, write, write and write some more.

I was thinking about going to the write-in that evening, but I think I’ll have to pass since I really do want to get my wordcount up to my goal. Although at the particular location where we will be has more distraction free internet, it’s really the people that are being the most distracting for me right now.

I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that tomorrow turns out to be a 10k or more day.

NaNo Day 16!

It’s now two days into my new novel and it’s looking pretty good, sort of. I knew writing science fiction wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as many of the others things I’ve done in the past, at least if I’m going to lean more towards the hard rather than soft, which is the current plan. But, I’m doing pretty good all things considered. This is, of course, further complicated by the fact that I don’t really read a lot of science fiction, and definitely not anything that deals with far future (ie over 1000 years into the future compounded with aliens that are even more older) or interstellar space travel.

I had a bit of a slow Monday for me, yesterday (duh!), but I was also doing a lot of moving around, first going to a coffee shop, then hearing that a group of people were having an impromptu meeting a couple hours later at another, and then after that was the scheduled write-in, so I ended up hitting three coffee-shops all about 10-15 minutes apart. Not to mention that the impromptu get together was very talkative, I only ended up with just over 3100 words, when I’m normally writing upwards of 5k on Mondays.

Today, however, I’m currently sitting at 2700 with plans to write at least another 300 words. While this puts me slightly below the average I need to write everyday to finish this second novel at 50k by the end of the month, I do expect that I’ll be making it up on Thursdays and Fridays when I generally do more writing (in the case of Thursdays) or should be able to do more (which is the case for Fridays, though I haven’t been doing much writing on them the last two weeks).

Of course, if by the end of Thursday I haven’t caught up, I’m going to have try and push for a really big weekend to get me caught up and hopefully ahead, since I have no idea how many words this novel will probably end up being. But all that aside, I’m really enjoying this new challenge and adventure in writing.

I hope you are all having fun on your novels (or other projects)!

Edit: Currently at 56167 words total, which means I hit my 3k for today. Which puts me at 508 words I need to make up so far between Thursday and Friday. Will probably end up with more to make up from Wednesday since it’s my busy day.

NaNo Day 11!

For the first time in a long time I wrote over 1000 words during a 15 minute word war. I haven’t read over it yet, but I’m guessing that about 1/3rd if not more will probably get cut when I go back and edit the novel. Several times during the war I thought about just typing about how I couldn’t think of what to type so that I could just ramble on, but I did really good and managed to stay semi-in-character. Which tends to be a bit easier since I’m writing in first person, so there is currently a random bit of extended monologue in my novel right now. But the good news is, I ended up having the most words so I won an awesome button!

In other news, I’m over 36,000 words. I ended up writing over 4000 words at the write-in tonight and spent most of the last hour not actually typing anything. We got really chatty which was nice because my brain sort of died after the word war. And since my brain is still pretty dead right now, I think I shall go crawl into bed.

Goodnight NaNoLand!

NaNo Day 10

I love spending time with other WriMo’s even if it is just on the forums or chatrooms. Today someone posted a link that really got me moving along. What is it, you might ask? A random number generator. Ultimately you can set it to randomly display a number between any number of values, but the link above will give you a number between 1 and 1000. The idea being, that once you get your number, even if you hate it, you minimize everything but what you are writing your novel in. Don’t go surfing the internet, don’t go into any chatrooms, don’t browse the pictures on your computer, don’t read your e-mail, just write. Once you finish the random number you got, take break do all that stuff you normally would when you procrastinate, then in 5-10 minutes, get yourself a new random number. Rinse and repeat until you reach your word goal for the day and write all the correct number or words that the generator gives you, because it never hurts to go over.

It honestly really helped get moving today, I ended up writing 2866 words today because I didn’t let myself shy away from the big numbers the generator kept throwing at me (748, 879, 943!).

Week two of NaNo can often be the hardest. All the energy you had at the beginning of the month starts to fade, your motivation starts to fail and, if your plot still hasn’t shown it’s face, you doubts will start setting in. Even though I’m over the the halfway mark, it doesn’t mean that I don’t face these kinds of things either. While I know exactly where the story is going now, I don’t always now how to get started each day or where to start my characters off. Today was one of those days where I just didn’t know what to have my characters do. But when I found something to give me a little push to write, and write anything that was related to the story, it got the words flowing and the story started moving along, inching closer and closer to that conclusion that I can see in the background.

So my friends, just keep writing, writing, writing!

NaNo Day 9

I’m sitting at 29,149 words, at least according to my word processor, which happens to be Microsoft Works. As I think about how close I’m starting to come to the finish line, even if its still technically weeks away, I can’t help but think about the numbers game in all this.

In the past years when I’ve used Microsoft Works it’s been pretty close to right on target when I go to validate, so it’s something that I’m not too worried about. But there are some programs that can vary quite widely. If I remember correctly, Google Docs has at times shown a vastly different count. Even Microsoft Word counts differently. Which means you can’t always just rely on the number you’re seeing. So, when it comes to validating, it can be pretty important if a few minutes before midnight you end up with 50000 words according to your word processor and you find that when you load it into the NaNo site you’ve lost a few dozen, maybe even over a hundred words.

So, as the month progresses if you find yourself just barely skimming by on the word count you need each day, I strongly encourage you to try and write a few extra words each day. Go above and beyond. Instead of just writing 1667 words every day, try and bump that number up to 1700! Don’t be afraid to pass the minimum and don’t think that if you hit 50,000 you should just stop, especially if your story isn’t done.

And most importantly, when validation opens up on the 25th, try it, even if you don’t have 50,000 words. It’ll be good to know about how much your word processor will vary from the official counter on the NaNo site.

NaNo Week 1 Complete!

Well, almost. There are still another four hours in the day for me. I’m sitting at a cool 22k right now with plans on bumping that up to 25k before the day is over. That would mean I’d end the week with my novel halfway done! Assuming it only ends up being 50k words.

In related NaNo thoughts, I was really wanting to use some specialized writing software this month, but I haven’t yet. Just before the month started I checked out Scrivener, which came out with its Windows Beta on October 25th. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exactly work well on my netbook. This led me to downloading Liquid Story Binder, which I haven’t touched since the day before NaNo started. So far, I think I prefer to write my novels in a plain word processor, but when I edit them, I think it would be extremely helpful and useful to use something like Liquid Story Binder to organize it. So I think I might actually bust out the card and purchase it while its 50% off.

Here’s to hoping that next week is even more productive!

NaNo Day 6

Like so many things, my day has not gone as planned at all. I didn’t manage to get to the gym before work, so I went to it after work. Which means that tomorrow I really can take a break from working out!

I also didn’t end up getting to the coffee shop where the write in was at till 11:15 which gave me about an hour and a half to write before I had to run to work. So I only got in 1721 words so far today. I am still planning on writing more before bed, especially since we fall back tonight. But my goal of a minimum of 10k this weekend is looking harder and harder to achieve. I do however have all of Sunday afternoon to write, so maybe I’ll be able to really pump out the words!

In a mostly unrelated note, I did a little bit of window shopping this morning to pick out a purse that my mother wanted to by me for Christmas. So I am now the proud owner of a B. Makowski purse that is ultra sexy! It will always be at my side and my netbook fits just perfectly inside the spacious pockets! This is probably also why I didn’t get much writing done, I spent far too much time squeeing over the purse before I even got it and then after my mom actually bought it.

NaNo Day 5

Despite having the day off, I didn’t really do much writing today. I spent most of the morning doing laundry and cleaning up around the house.

I also haven’t touched my Google Reader. It’s going to be very scary soon. Over 75 blog posts to read now.

Rather than going to a write-in I decided to spend the evening sort of watching TV and hanging out with my mother while attempting to write. The result was 1753 words, just enough to get me over the minimum I should be writing per day, but not really adding much to the 20k I’ve said that I would attempt this weekend nor to the 10k challenge for my region that I joined.

Since I’ll be working through most of the write-in tomorrow, I’m going to go early and get some writing done before anyone is there. I’m not entirely sure if there will be wireless there, but if there isn’t, it’ll probably be a good thing. A few hours of distraction free writing would generally help my wordcount goals.

In other news, I have so far worked out all 5 days of NaNo. I plan on getting up early tomorrow to workout before I go write. I’m hoping to be at the gym by 8am and then start writing by 10am so that when I have to leave for work before 1pm I’ll have 4-6k written.

And now I shall trundle off to bed. If you happen to find my brain, please return it. It seems to disappear after 8pm.

NaNo Day 4

I think I will just have to accept that I’m just not as fast as I was in the past. But it is for a good reason! I find now that I think more, rather than just typing whatever just comes to mind, which means that there is a lot less utter crap in my novel. Now, that doesn’t mean there is none, because I’m sure hefty chunks will be removed and/or rewritten. But I’m taking time to think about what I’m about to write and where it will take my story if it’ll go there. And to make everything better, I’m still getting a good amount of writing done.

According to the NaNo site I am currently 4 days ahead of schedule (just under 13k and hopefully over 13k by the time midnight hits). I wrote 4007 words today at last check, which brought my average words per day back up over 3000.

Despite the fact that I’m not going as fast as I would have hoped, I am extremely pleased with what I am getting done and that I’m way ahead of the game. Which means that at the end of the month I’ll have time for other assorted writing projects I’ve been planning on working on for a while.

So, double yay!

I hope the rest of you are doing good!