Sunday, November 28, 2010

The End of NaNoWriMo

It's official.  I got to about 55K words and validated, so I'm now an official "winner!"  Whoot!  The story isn't finished, but my adventures in NaNoWriMo are for this year.  My next goal will be to finish the story and get it edited and published.  The first two parts aren't so hard.  That won't happen in the month of December because I have other priorities, but it'll happen.

The last one?  Maybe it'll take a while.  Maybe it won't.  That's in bigger hands than mine.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

NaNoWriMo Update

With only 9 days to go, I'm way ahead of the slope.  I'm at 40K words.  There's no way the story will be finished at 50K, but that's all right.  It doesn't have to be.  The deal is to write 50K words of a novel, and that I can manage.  I may have another 50K to go later, but that's later.

For now, the two POV characters have met one another and aren't sure what to make of each other.  The two human characters haven't exactly met yet.  One of them was injured and still working toward recovery.

I got that far ahead for a very unfortunate reason.  I can't take flu shots because I react to eggs, so I had to get my antibodies the old-fashioned way.  I got the flu.  So, in between naps, I worked on NaNoWriMo. 

I'm doing much better now.

Off to go enter the next installment of the novel.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month is a grand adventure .  The challenge is to write 50K words toward a novel, which amounts to about 1.7K words per day.  The way I write, that's 3 typed, single-spaced, 12-point, 1" margin pages.

When someone suggested I give it a shot, my first thought was, "Are you kidding me?"  I didn't think I could keep up with the pace, what with the hours I keep for work.  So far, though, I'm actually a touch ahead of schedule. 

I had to make some changes to the way I write.  There's no way I'd have time to write it by hand, which I normally do as a concession for a wrist injury many years ago, then type it in, so I'm composing at the computer.  That means I have to take a lot of breaks so I don't blow my wrist apart again.  Taking breaks means I can't just get the idea and go with it.  I have to stop for a few minutes without losing track of where I was.

It's working out, actually.  Hammering out the ~1.7K words per day is taking about 1.5-2 hours.  I really can't say it's my best writing, but the whole purpose of editing is to straighten out all those irritating little glitches.

One week down ... 3 to go.