NaNoWriMo
- Details
- Written by: Administrator
- Hits: 7277
25,118 Words, 19 days in.
That’s nearly 13,000 words behind my 2000/day word goal, but only 6,555 behind the NaNo goal of 1667/day. So a couple of stellar writing days and I should be back on track.
I bet you expected I'd fall off the wagon. Oh, you know me so well. I refuse to quit, though. Still being dragged along by a tether, battered but furously kicking my legs to get back on my feet.
As for the story, it continues to travel places I hadn’t anticipated. Some of the paths are predictable and not very interesting, but some of them are new and full of potential. I’m really looking forward to getting this thing written, letting it simmer for a couple of months then working through the editing process.
It looks like I’ll be packing the AlphaSmart NEO with me on our trip to Florida. Did I purposely sabotage my efforts to get ahead just so that I’d have an excuse to stay in and write while Chuck and the boys entertain my in-laws?
That's mean. Stop it.
- Details
- Written by: Administrator
- Hits: 7386
40,883.
Betcha thought I dropped out, eh?
It's okay, I had my moment of doubt, too. I rolled into Thanksgiving week under 27,000 words, knowing that I'd not likely get much writing done over our trip to Florida. We headed out of town last Sunday; me armed with the AlphaSmart Neo and my novel on a USB flash drive. I managed to squeak out a couple thousand words during the trip, but found it hard to get in the groove.
When I woke this morning and calculated that winning NaNo was going to take more than 20,000 words over the next three days, the fight-or-flight instinct set in and I got down to typing.
I'm ready to call it a night, but feel confident that I'll hit the 50,000 word goal by midnight November 30th. I do have until midnight, right?
Okay, so that's 10,000 words less than my personal 60,000 word goal, but, that's been the story of my life - whatever it takes to get by.
I'll work on behavior modification once NaNo is over.
Thank you for hanging on with me for the ride!
- Details
- Written by: Administrator
- Hits: 7622
46, 042
I KNOW I can, I KNOW I can...
- Details
- Written by: Administrator
- Hits: 8545
Well, there it is. My big, fat NaNoWriMo Winner button!
I clocked in around 5:30 PM on November 30th with a total word count of 50,687. The book is titled Eva and is about...well, it's kinda hard to explain what it's about because there are really two separate stories going on at the same time and I haven't formulated a synopsis.
The inspiration for Eva was a missing persons case that made the news back when I lived in the U.P. in the 80's (Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in case you're unfamiliar with The U.P.). My intent was to write a mystery/suspense fictional piece based on that case, but a few thousand words into it, the thing morphed to encompass Native American spiritualism and magical realism. In the end, it bears no resemblance at all to the story that inspired it.
I joked that my book shares certain qualities with all great literature: it has a beginning, middle and an end. That's pretty much where the similarities stop.
50,000+ words in a month did not yield, for me, great - nay, even good, writing. What it did yield was the bones of a novel, or two. I've also fallen back in love with the process of writing. I'm more in tune with the world around me. Heck, I've even started carrying around my spiral bound pack of index cards so I can jot down ideas, sights, smells and dialogue stolen through eavesdropping.
This manuscript will be put to rest for a while. I have a bit of research to do to add flesh to some areas, and there are other pieces that will be carved out completely. In the meantime, I'm starting on my next novel, which is a YA Fantasy book I've been contemplating for some time.
Who knows, though? Give these characters an inch and they'll take a mile. Pretty soon, you might not know where you're headed.