clare_dragonfly | Entries tagged with nanowrimo

If you like NaNo or my writing and also Twitter, you may be interested to know that I am doing polls on Twitter to make decisions for my NaNo novel! I am hoping to write something silly this year to ease the burden on my poor pregnant brain, and crowdsourcing my ideas seems like a great way to keep it silly and engaging.

The first poll, about what world the novel should be set in, is up now! https://twitter.com/clarekrmiller/status/920088468491038721

58. Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater - *****
59. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell - ****
60. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - ****
61. Raging Star by Moira Young - *** 1/2
62. Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston - DNF

( reading bingo and NaNo )

This is the closest to the deadline that I've ever won! I guess that's what happens when you go on a somewhat impromptu road trip in the middle of the month...

I'm at 30k words now, and I am swiftly approaching the end of my outline. The plot is almost wrapped up; I don't think I have more than 10k left to go. It actually doesn't bother me that my novel(la) is going to be 40k or less. The whole plot is in there, I'm happy with the pacing, and honestly, I really like shorter books!

But of course, this is NaNo, and I need a way to fill out my 50k. So I figured I'd ask you guys for advice.

( plot and ideas below! )

Any thoughts? Feel free to cast your vote for one choice or the other, ask any questions you can think of, or suggest other options I haven't thought of!

Yup, that's #7.

Maybe I'll do something different next year. ;)

alderpsrig is still posting for her Giraffe Call; read the results! They are awesome.

What do you need or want? (LJ link) Maybe other people can help.

Holiday virtual mall!

whatawaytoburn is doing Tarot and writing commissions to save some money for a trip to California.

I just passed 28k this morning on the Nano. It's going swimmingly. Very happy with the story, which has explored things I've been wanting to look harder at but didn't think would come up in this book.

2,129 words today for a total of 18,584. Word wars are awesome. My region has a chat room this year, which is pretty awesome.

I feel really accomplished on the holiday gift front. I've decided on the gifts I'm making, and they're fairly simple; the gifts I'm not making are all purchased. (I just spent a ton of money on Amazon. Some of it is for me.) I just need to get to a craft store for some yarn and packaging. Which is not exactly a hardship.

NaNo total as of tonight: 11,430 words. I'm still a little behind, but I wrote just over 2000 words today, and I'm very happy with that. Especially since there were some guys playing a violent video game at the write-in today, which made it hard to focus (the violence didn't bother me; the noise did). One of the great benefits of working on two things--it's much easier for me to focus on the fanfic.

Also, look at this awesome icon

meeks made for me! Look how pretty it is! Look at the tiny blue flowers! The yellow-and-orange lilies! Look at the rose growing from the "d" in "garden"! Meeks has once again outdone my imagination.

I didn't end up writing yesterday. Too tired and brain-fuzzy. But I made my personal goal of 1500 words for today, and while I'm behind with a total of 7588 words, I'm confident I can catch up once I'm over this cold.

Yeah, I'm officially doing a regular 50k Nano instead of my planned double-Nano. Oh well, maybe next year. I'm still combining two stories, but that's mostly so I don't have to chuck the words I've already written on my second piece! And maybe I'll work on it some more, at some point...

You hate me.

1. Sick bunny. Much stress, and now fuss over medications. (He's getting better quickly. Medicating him is less than fun, though.)

2. Sick me. Down with a bad cold--and when I say I have a bad cold, you know it's really bad, since my colds are pretty awful to begin with. Drinking a lot of tea, trying to also drink a lot of water, but it's cold.

3. Which, of course, leads to the inability to drive anywhere this weekend, which means I'm missing Faeriecon and the planned visit with my fiancé. Bleah. (Anyone want a Faeriecon Saturday pass? It looks like you only need the order number. And possibly to pretend to be me.)

Oh, and now my parents have taken my great-uncle to the hospital (may or may not be a false alarm; he's rather a hypochondriac, but he's also 89 and has multiple health problems) so I have to fetch my own dinner, but cooking is too much work and nothing sounds appealing anyway. Except more tea. I guess I should just have more tea.

My writing is rather suffering. I haven't written anything today which would be perfectly acceptable any month but this one. I'm going to try to get in 500 words are so but won't push myself, considering how slowly my brain is working. Also I have no idea what the "are so" is doing in that sentence but I'll leave it there as evidence that my brain isn't working. Pretty sure at this point that there's no use in even thinking about a 100k word goal. Maybe next year?

And now we descend into the bosom of that soul-sucking beast, NaNoWriMo.

If I don't comment on your entries this month, that's because a) I'm out of time, b) I'm out of spoons, or c) my hands are in pain from writing over three thousand words that day.

Attempting 100k in the month. Wish me luck. Yes, I promise I will slow down or stop if I actually injure myself.

So, you know, this year I was thinking about skipping NaNo. Which I've done before. Once. The other times, I haven't really succeeded. So, yeah, when I got an email from my ML... I realized there's no way I'm skipping this year!

However, I have a lot of different ideas for what I should write and I'm having trouble deciding. No, this isn't a list of all my ideas ever, but it is a list of my thoughts for this year's NaNo and the pros and cons.

( This is pretty long. )

So... any thoughts? Does anyone else see pros and cons I may have missed? Which of these would you be most interested in reading?

And with 80,179 words, I have completed my National Novel Writing Month goal.

This was a pretty good number to aim for, though it did mean I couldn't do that much else this month--then again, apparently that's the normal Nano experience, which I've never really felt before; 1667 words a day just cut into my internet-time-wasting, not my time to do other things. 2667 was definitely doable for me, but as long as I'm not making a living from my writing, I won't be making that my daily goal again.

Oh, and no, the novel's not done. At this point I'm pretty sure that it will be a full 100k, if not a bit more. I really have no idea how the protagonist is going to defeat the demon, especially considering her main allies are now dead, in the hospital, and in jail (that's chronological order). Fun! She's getting help from a Catholic priest right now... or she might not actually get his help, considering that the presence of the ghost possessing her means she can't walk through the door into the church. I'll see where that goes.

Well, this year's Nano has allowed me to discover an interesting pattern in my writing. After a thousand words or so, the words flow a lot more easily. I never could have noticed that before, because there's only been four or five days before in my life that I've written more than two thousand words in a day!

Cool new things keep popping up. Like a love triangle. I didn't know there was going to be a love triangle but I'm glad there is, I think. Actually, make that, I didn't know there was going to be a love triangle involving the main character and her main love interest--there already is one between the ghost and the people who killed her ;)

Oh, there's also the little metal god figurine. I have no idea where that is going to go, except that it's a good-luck and protection charm, which should be useful. It has helped the main character with her homework, but that's not terribly plot-relevant. I mean, it's important, because it's important to her, but it has nothing to do yet with the demon!

I think 2700-3000 words a day is the most I can do consistently (I think my average is around 2800, not counting the short days from FaerieCon or the long first day). It's cool to know my limits. Then again, I'm pretty sure if I could outline more thoroughly beforehand, I could write more in a day. Most days I'm not only writing two or three scenes, I'm also coming up with future scenes and writing a brief description so I don't forget what has to happen. (On that subject, I freaking love Scrivener.)

In other news, I'm watching Criminal Minds and the episode is called "Into the Woods," so I'm muting the TV during commercials and playing the Into the Woods soundtrack. Because I'm a dork.

A bit over 3000 words so far, which is a couple hundred over my daily goal. I have no intention of stopping for the day, and I mustn't get too complacent--just over a thousand of that was written yesterday, starting at midnight before I went to bed, and I really shouldn't make a habit of that. It took too long and I was up past my bedtime!

My main character seems to be very... bossy? headstrong? I swear I had a better word to describe her earlier, but I can't come up with it. (This seems to be what my brain does.) That's a good thing in some ways--she's directing the story well and actually, you know, does stuff, unlike some MCs I've had in the past--but she also insisted on telling the story in first person, which is not something I'm very used to. I suppose I can manage.