Home Posts tagged "Nanowrimo" (Page 2)

Tag: Nanowrimo

TeamTinyNaNo

If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you know that all four of us Turtleduck Press authors are old hands at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). That’s where we met, in fact–on the NaNo forums, many moons ago. (Or most of us? One of them will correct me if I’m wrong.) Most of us still haven’t met in person…but I digress. Back in the day, we were young(er) and foolish and could whip out the requisite 50,000 words in a month without breaking a sweat. (Okay, maybe a little bit of sweat.) But for me at least, those days are long gone. My brain, wrists, and responsibilities won’t let me rack up words like that anymore. Still, there’s something magical about that NaNo energy. So we were talking in our regular virtual write-in, and KD suggested that even if we couldn’t manage 1,667 words a day in November, we could surely manage 100 words a day. (Hat tip to Debbie Ohi as well.) It would get us 3000 words by the end of the month. That’s not exactly a NaNo, but it’s not nothing, either. It’s about a chapter (or two chapters or half a chapter, depending on pacing). Or it’s one short story. Or it’s several flash fiction stories. And, more importantly, it’s more than we had in October. For me at least, it was also more than I’d written in October. Spoiler: we did it. We may not have written every single day, but Erin, KD,…

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December: The Creativity Sink

So, as I mentioned last month, like Siri, I too attempted Nano for the first time in many years. And I did it! It took some finessing (I wrote 7K in the course of a night to catch up at one point), but it got done, and without any fudging on my part. Every year that I am successful at Nano, I swear I’m going to keep going. Sure, not another 50K month in a row, but a significant amount, and the draft will be done in a few months, hooray! Every year it doesn’t happen. (Perhaps the worst offender of this was Shards, actually. I hit 50K at a rather privotal moment and stopped there, not even bothering to wrap up the scene. And every time I tried to go back to it, for months, I couldn’t figure out where to go and it got absolutely nowhere.) (I mean obviously it did eventually, but you’d think I’d learn.) (But apparently I haven’t.) And this is true every winning November. Despite my best intentions, I can’t seem to keep going on my Nano novel, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether things were flowing well during November or not. I’ve come up with some theories: Burnout. Maybe I’m just tried of that particular project. That doesn’t read particularly true, since I often spend several months to a year of consistent work on revisions or rewrites, but maybe! Or maybe I’m burned out on the pace and I need a break…

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NaNoFail?

This year, I set out to do National Novel Writing Month for the first time in most of a decade. I’d won NaNo six times between 2005 and 2011, and then hadn’t really tried again since. Oh, I had made halfhearted attempts to use that NaNo energy to finish a partial novel or edit a draft, but I’d never come close to the wordcount and the free abandon of my six 50,000-word drafts. (No, none of them are available on Amazon. Because, that’s why.) So I really wanted to prove to myself that I still had the chops. Then Real Life hit. It wasn’t entirely unpredictable. In fact, it wasn’t unpredictable at all. I was out of town the first weekend, then back to work without a break. Then I started some new meds that gave me horrible insomnia for a week (a known side effect, so that wasn’t even a surprise). By the time I caught up on sleep from all of that, the month was half over. It’s not that I wasn’t writing. I took my laptop with me on the weekend trip and squeaked out a few hundred words each day. I came home and every day, even through the insomnia, I would put down another few hundred words. But for NaNo, you need to write 1,666 words every day for a month. If you miss one day, every other day requires more words. So I kept thinking that my daily wordcount would pick up after I…

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Is it Nano if There are not Dinosaurs?

Happy November, friends! ‘Round these here parts, it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which I am doing for the first time in five years. The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month. (I’m at 19,000 as of yesterday.) The idea behind Nano is that, instead of letting yourself get bogged down in worries about the quality of your writing, you focus on quantity, and, in theory, unleash your inner creativity that would never come out under normal circumstances. I love Nano, but Nano is not always the right solution for where I currently am in my writing career. But when they do line up–why not go in, feet first, with all the reckless abandon I can manage? The story I’m working on this year is one that I had a vague idea for that never gelled. So I stole it and stuck it in Hidden Worlds. Then, of course, after Hidden Worlds was published and released into the wild, the story gelled. About five years ago, I did a ton of research for the story and wrote the first chapter. And then I put it away, to be worked on when I got around to it. Well, I’ve gotten around to it. The story is a kind-of Odyssey-ish voyage across an ocean, focusing on themes of redemption, knowing and trusting yourself, and discovering your worth. Which is all lovely. Sounds like I know what I’m doing, doesn’t it? But it also gives me leave to make a bunch…

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Random Stuff in My Head

Usually I can come up with a subject to blog about fairly easily, but today I feel like everything I came up with was repetitive or boring. So I give you this, a random mishmash of sh$% inside my head. You’re welcome. 🙂 Random thought #1: Last night, I dreamed I was in a room and there was an earthquake. The entire room shook (and maybe the whole city?). In the dream I screamed, and in real life, I screamed too. I woke my husband up and he held me for a bit. Say it with me: “Awwwwww.” Random thought #2: I made a very odd yet intriguing discovery last night around 12:30. I had a horrific TN pain attack and needed a painkiller, and I wondered idly if it was tied to my hormonal cycle. I remembered reading something about that before. So because I’m a bad ass and have an app and a log of all my pain for the past two years, the information was literally at my fingertips. I did a quick cursory glance so I don’t know about all of it, but from what I read so far, there is definitely a correlation. I’d like to eventually put it into a spreadsheet or graph or something so I can see it all together (one day, she says. One day when she’s not slammed with work). Random Thought #3: I just landed two new clients, yay! Both are amazing and awesome and I am so happy.…

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