Almost November!

Are you ready?

Yes, it’s almost NaNoWriMo time!

National Novel Writing Month is an old favorite of mine. Of eight years, I only crashed and burned once, and six of the books I wrote have been published.

https://nanowrimo.org/what-is-nanowrimo

Now, that doesn’t mean my reaching the goal of 50,000 words written in November means I’m ready to publish! There’s always editing! Last year’s effort wound up getting interwoven into something else—and published. After a lot of polishing.

But how would you like to have a 50K rough draft on December One?

I use NaNo as a yearly tune-up, thirty days of writing and never stopping to edit or polish. Thirty days of pushing to write regularly.

If you’ve never tried it, do. It might work for you, too.

23 thoughts on “Almost November!”

      1. I do the web page just for the chart. The chat stuff just doesn’t work for me. I’ll have to track down the FB site for Huns and Barflies.

          1. I’m a moderator for that, turns out. It’s set to “secret” but I don’t think we care too much about that. It’s not for deep personal confessions, after all. 🙂

            Anyhow, if anyone wants to join for this year’s NaNo to do a bit of mutual cheering on and word count posts, message me, I guess. 🙂 My FB is Julie Pascal…

        2. I didn’t do the chit-chatting thing, just found I got less done and usually forgot to update the chart; did learn to start writing the ending/starting number of words at the bottom of a document with the date (so I could enter it to the site) though, which works for me.

  2. Not quite ready yet, but I still have 20 days. I have a novel summary as well as a chapter list and a summary of the first two chapters. I’m hoping to summarize a couple more today.

    NaNo is an event I always look forward to every year. The 50K words are nice, but what I really like is getting together with the other NaNoers in the area and sitting there and writing together in a coffee shop or bookstore. Sarah had a post here a few weeks ago about how it can feel like you’re insane because you’re a writer and no one else around you does what you do. NaNo is one of the few opportunities I have to get together with others like me in meat space.

  3. I stopped doing NaNoWriMo several years ago because the competitive drama of it outweighed it fin of it. (And, interestingly enough, the drama was the same whether I told everyone I was doing it, one person I was doing it, or absolutely no one.)

    1. The first time I did it, I thought I wouldn’t like it, because deadlines seem to panic me into a bad case of the”words just won’t come.”

      But for some reason, this didn’t. Maybe the goal of 1700 words every day instead of 50K this month made it look easy, instead of a huge cliff I couldn’t possibly climb.

  5. I’m planning not to, this year, because my load at Day Job went up by 30%, with two new classes to prepare for. And family coming to visit during Thanksgiving break will also slow my writing pace.

  6. I’m planning to do it this year, if only to get myself back on track and FINISH something. (Which has not been happening lately.)

  8. I never do the website.

    Not going to do the words, either. Nothing is ready without being started.

  9. Me?

    Hahahaha.

    Okay, yes, I am plotting something, know how it ends, have character motivation and the start of an outline. It’s a huge mess that I have not made significant progress on in a while. My intuition tells me that I may a fundamental mismatch driving some serious problems. I don’t know how to describe or estimate what may be going on.

    Maybe I have five gallons of stuff I want to happen. I’m not sure how much volume I have the character motivation and organization for.

    I might have another tool and process to test.

    I definitely have a bunch of RL deliverables that I am just starting to get organized on. And stuff to do that will conflict with creative writing in time and energy and probably skillset.

    1. I may be crazy enough to try to move the creative writing along anyway. It isn’t clear that I’m crazy enough to commit to Nanowrimo given everything else. I’m not going to say “I can’t” or “I’m not crazy enough to”, because this project has been a result of serially proving those sorts of statements wrong. Something inside takes it as a challenge.

  10. I love NanoWriMo. I’ve only gotten the 50,000 twice, but regardless, I get a lot of writing done and get to help cheer on my friends. It’s a great event to really get some things done before the holidays set in.

  12. Is it that time already? Gosh, I’d better decide soon, hadn’t I?

    I did NaNo last year for the first time, and ground out 51,000+ new words on a novel I was already about 3,000 words into. Great, but after that I didn’t have time to look at it till January. At that time I was too busy to write, as I was getting the previous novel out in paperback, and— Well, ok, I knew a lot of what I’d written in November was drivel and was looking for any excuse not to deal with it.

    When I tried to opened the file again in May, I discovered that somehow, back in January most likely, I’d accidentally deleted the doc from November 30 and was left with the file I’d saved on November 28. It was nearly 6,000 words shorter than my final NaNo tally (I checked on the website), and I was facing having to reconstruct the missing chapters. Which I didn’t start on till July.

    If I embark on the NaNo venture this year, I suppose I could start on Part 2 of the same novel. That is, IF I can get the rest of the information I need on a new character I’ve introduced. I don’t want to be putting down a lot of unfeasible garbage I have to take out later.

    (More specifically, I need resources on developing a character who’s a US Army officer. Can anybody here direct me to some? My gratitude will abound.)

  13. I’ll probably end up doing the modified version of it that I’ve done before: 50,000 words. About anything. Because I usually work on multiple projects at once, to keep from getting bored with one, it’s not realistic to try to write 50,000 words on only one project. I either get blocked and don’t write anything, or I’d have to write three times as much to get the 50,000 words I needed on one project. I’m also trying to publish three more times before the end of the year, and doing some traveling, so I have to take the words as they come; I can’t tell them to wait their turn, or they’ll wander off and I’ll never get them back :p

  14. I like the word count functions on the web site. Other than that, I’d rather talk to people I “know” on the Facebook group (probably the one Pam linked, I didn’t check). I’ve never found the NaNo forums useful.

    Last year I got to 40K which is a personal record so I suppose I shouldn’t feel bad about not “winning.”

    We’ll see how this year goes.

    (Oh gawd… I think I lost an entire year someplace… I betcha that 40K was two years ago… omg.)

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