I am not ready to commit to NaNoWriMo 2018 just yet, but I do have a plan to follow, should I decide to do so. Here it is:
Have a plan
This is to say, not only have an idea, but have a story ready and planned out in advance
Planning means outlining. Outlining the whole thing. Even the ending.
Choose the writing program to be used
Current candidates: WriteMonkey, Scrivener, Atomic Scribbler, iA Writer
Develop a proper save/backup scheme that won’t result in corrupted files and a sad author
Do more testing of dictation to help speed up the first draft process
Write 50,000 words in 30 days between November 1-30, 2018
This concludes my plan.
I’ve highlighted the most important part in bold.
Winging in–called pantsing by NaNoWriMo folks–has not just failed for me in past attempts, it’s failed spectacularly. See my 2017 summary for an example. This year I am going to outline my story in advance. If I don’t have this done by November 1, I will not take part. Instead I will post an amusing cat picture on this blog that is somehow writing-related. Maybe I’ll do that, anyway.
Tomorrow I’ll post some of the story ideas I’m mulling.
Yep, with today being the last day of the month, it’s time to summarize my National Novel Writing Month effort this year and LOL is a pretty good summary.
I wrote 2557 words a few days in…for a different novel. Then my keyboard was stilled as I was overwhelmed by events, ennui, personal drama and The Rains (I read today that this November is the fourth-wettest since they started keeping records. The forecast is for sun to return next month. Then probably blizzards for the next three months).
In all, my effort was so minimal it’s difficult to feel disappointed. It’s like scolding yourself for how you placed in a race you never actually participated in.
Apart from this blog, my writing in general has stalled, which is not good. I’ll be returning to The Other 11 Months writing group on Sunday and seeing how it goes there, but if I am to write more I need to do it more often than just on Sundays. It’s not like writing is a religious experience for me.
But perhaps I should pray to the spirit of Harlan Ellison. Except he’s still alive and would tell me to stop writing nonsense on a blog and start writing a ripping good yarn by grabbing legal pad and fountain pen.
Tomorrow I’ll unveil my newest and bestest writing plan.
There are two weeks left before the end of the month. As of today to be on track with my NaNoWriMo novel progress, I would need to have written:
26,672 words
As of today, I have actually written:
2,557 words
This gives me a word deficit of:
24,115 words
In order to successfully complete NaNoWriMo 2017, I would need to increase my daily input of words from 1,667 words to:
3,388 words
This is actually not an impossible goal. It would require several hours of intense writing every day, though putting in extra time during the remaining four weekend days would help offset that a bit.
The reality is that’s not going to happen. NaNoWriMo has often been the tonic to cure my writing blahs but this year–even with the regular writing group I’ve been going to–it just hasn’t happened. November has been a busy and stressful month, I’ve exercised less, eaten more, and I now seem to have some kind of official fall/winter sinusitis thing going which is making me seriously consider one of those horrible “nasal irrigation” devices because thirty seconds of shoving this weird thing up my nose in exchange for being able to breathe normally has real appeal.
I’d prefer to just be able to breathe normally.
I’m still hoping to kickstart my writing before the end of the month, but I know the only secret is to just make myself do it and the fact that I haven’t is maybe underlining the fact that I just don’t care enough anymore. Maybe all the future holds is blog ramblings and funny cat pictures.
On Day 4 of NaNoWriMo I wrote zero words, going 0-4 for the first four days and leaving me with a deficit of 6,668 words–a positively devilish amount to catch up on (ho ho).
My plan today was to go to the usual write-in at Waves in sunny downtown New Westminster (where during the other 11 months of the year it’s known as, well, The Other 11 Months) and do a good bit of catching up by reviving my unfinished 2013 novel, Start of the World (definitely a working title).
Good news: I did indeed write, putting together 2557 words. This gives me a deficit after five days of 5778 words. If you divide that over the remaining 25 days, I would need to write an additional 231 words per day, which seems pretty easy when looked at this way. So I should be good as long as I keep up a slightly above average pace from here on out.
But here’s the surprise twist: I didn’t work on Start of the World. Instead, I continued work on my 2014 NaNo novel, Road Closed. I added 50,000 words to the current word count total, bringing it to 120,242 words, then started back on it.
I’m not sure if this is the right thing to do, a good thing to do or something else. It is clearly a thing to do because I’m doing it. Tomorrow I’ll decide if I want to keep doing it. I’m not sure there’s 50,000 more words in this novel but you never know. I could channel my inner Stephen King and just not leave out anything at all, writing a kind of complete and uncut edition right from the start. Smothering my inner editor with a pillow. Not killing my darlings, but nurturing them and encouraging them to procreate. And other assorted weird analogies.
Anyway, it was nice to write again.
We had twelve people in attendance, but the table (which mysteriously moves every week) only seats eight, so multiple people had to sit on the floor. I’m betting some of them will arrive earlier next week to indulge in the luxury of writing while sitting in a chair.
I still haven’t written anything but the weekend beckons and it’s my chance to get the proverbial ball rolling on this year’s novel attempt. One might say actually getting some words down at this point would be novel, ho ho.
I kind of wish weekends were three days long, though. It would help. Also helping would be if the goal of NaNoWriMo was, say, 10,000 words. I could churn that out in desperation on the final weekend if I had to.
Not that I’ll need to, mind you. No sir. This weekend (the first weekend) I’m going to catch up on word count (from zero to greater than zero) then keep flying through to victory by the end of the month.
But I’ve settled on an alternate plan, which is to rewrite my failed 2013 novel, which had the awkward working title of Start of the World. I’ll spend time tomorrow mulling and then tomorrow evening I’m going to start writing. I have some ideas.
I can’t say I’m confident in how this will turn out, but I am genuinely interested in tackling this particular unfinished project again, so I have that in my favor.
Also, while I’m not yet changing the description of the novel, I am probably not going to keep the title of Cosmic Tingles. That might work better…elsewhere.
It’s just after 10 p.m. as I type these words and my story progress stands at zero. I have written nothing. The previous two sentences are two more than I’ve written for my NaNoWriMo 2017 project.
If the evening ends with me writing nothing–and that seems rather likely at this point–I will need to double my effort to 3,334 words tomorrow to stay on track. Am I already doomed? Perhaps.
But perhaps not. Maybe in desperation I will find inspiration. Maybe I’ll dig out some old unfinished work and pick up where I left off, the words gushing forth like blood from a skewered artery.
It’s funny how something that only happens once a year can sneak up on you. Or how when you try to think of ideas your brain just seizes up and refuses to even offer up anything, even objectively terrible stuff.
But I will ponder tonight, evaluate my back-up plan and make a decision tomorrow on how to proceed.
Pays off in the sense that I have no idea what I’m doing. Which isn’t much of a payoff. The irony is I just finished a book a few weeks ago (Story Genius) that specifically lays out, in great detail, how to plan out a novel.
For NaNoWriMo 2017 I have made it as far as the “I think I may write a novel” stage.
I have gotten no further.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve set up Scrivener again so I’m ready to go with that if need be. But as far as what I’ll write…no clue. My success rate when going in and latching onto some plot device at the last minute is not terribly good. It is more terribly terrible. This means my effort will likely crash and burn.
Perhaps, though, something fantastic will come to me in a dream tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or maybe the first night of NaNo. After that it probably won’t matter.
Maybe for the eve of NaNoWriMo (tomorrow) I’ll try to inspire myself with another patented* list of lovingly handmade writing prompts.
In which I try my old technique of coming up with the title first and the story second. Since this is brainstorming and I rarely control my impulse to be silly this is not terribly likely to yield useful results, but stranger and more horrible things have happened.
Cosmic Tingles (this was actually suggested as the new title for my novel Road Closed, suggested by a co-worker; I just really want to use it somewhere)
Hatful of Hats
The Biomechanical Keyboard
Lost in Thought Experiment
50,000 Words in 50,000 Days
The Girl Who Could Write Better Novel Titles Than Me
National Novel Writing Month starts in two weeks and my current plan is non-existent. I’m still not entirely sure I’m going to participate.
This is probably not how best-selling novels are born.
Maybe I wouldn’t know how to handle the fame of being a best-selling author and it’s all for the best, anyway.
Or maybe I just need to come up with a title with the word “girl” in it. Current novels break down like this:
Self-published paranormal romances on amazon: 22%
The usual big names whose ebooks are always curiously priced higher than the paper versions: 31%
Books with “girl” in the title: 36%
Everything else: 11%
Most of the good novel titles featuring “girl” have already been used, since there are millions of these books out there, enough to form a new continent if stitched together and waterproofed.
But here’s a few from my five-second brainstorming session:
The Girl Who Wrote Novels About Girls
The Girl With the Word Girl on the Book Cover
The Girl Who Dated a Squirrel
The Girl Girl Girl Girl Girl
The important thing is I’m still trying to come up with something, even if inspiration has not only left me, it’s departed to another dimension.
Maybe I could write a novel about other dimensions. No, wait, I tried that last year and failed. 🙁
Maybe I’ll come up with more cockamamie ideas tomorrow as The Rains sweep through the area and the only choices are brainstorming or to stare out the window and despair. Yes, that’s it. Tomorrow will be a grand day of brainstorms! And real storms.
In 31 days National Novel Writing Month will begin once again, challenging writers to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days (that’s 1,667 words per day).
My success rate with NaNo has dipped below 50% since I started in 2009 and this is the first year where I’ve seriously considered not participating. However, my writing has largely stalled over the last two months, thanks to a combination of vacation time getting me out of the habit, an unfinished short story leaving me flummoxed and frustrated, and my preferred writing program suddenly and obnoxiously switching to a subscription model, leading me to dumping it.
They’re all excuses, really. I could have kept writing because the writing program (whichever one I may use) is just that, a tool. I have a plethora of options to choose from, so saying I can’t find a good replacement for the one I’ve stopped using would be like saying I couldn’t use a particular keyboard because it wasn’t the right color (I was originally going to say typewriter instead of keyboard, but a lot of people probably don’t even know what a typewriter is anymore, except as a prop sometimes seen in old timey movies).
The problem is the usual lack of discipline. I mean, look at me right this moment–I am once again desperately cheating my way through that one-post-per-day thing by attempting to write nine posts in one day so I’ll have 30 for the month (this post will bring me up to 25). The reason I’m doing this is because I lack the discipline to write one post per day (a simple and relatively easy task as I’m not exactly writing thesis papers here) and instead must cram in many posts on the final day (a not-so-easy task that may result in posts of less than great ambition and/or quality. See: the next post, which is going to be a haiku).
NaNo is a great way to reignite discipline, assuming the chosen novel keeps on rolling instead of smashing into a brick wall on the third day. I tend to write NaNo novels that feature roads dotted with random brick walls.
I can make this deal with myself: If I don’t get my writing back on track by the end of October, I do NaNo. If my writing is on track, I skip NaNo, because interrupting a project humming along to start another that may crash and burn in short order does not seem like the best plan.
This means I’ll have to start thinking of ideas, too. I hate this part.
I’ll report back in one month with my decision, possibly with a new keyboard in hand. But probably not.
