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Tag: NANOWRIMO

A NANOWRIMO Up Date

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A NANOWRIMO Up Date

 

So, it is not December and I felt that I should give an update on my NANOWRIMO attempt. The short version is I did not win. I really only got 2 days of writing done. Let me elaborate.

 

At the time I started this, I was down both of my computers. My Chromebook and my laptop running Linux both quit. They were dead. But I was going to push on. I was going to write on my Samsung tablet. But, that was not the best option. There were also some other things going on in my life and I just had trouble actually writing. In the end, I just didn’t really do much at all.

 

Now, what am I going to do moving forward? I am still going to work on the book. In fact, I have knocked out about 11000 words so far. I like this story and I want to finish it, it will just be later than I had hoped.

 

I know that the goal of NANOWRIMO has always been to motivate people to write. It is the nudge that is often needed to get people to start writing. And it did that for me. So, in that regard, I would say that I succeeded. I just didn’t make the 30 day goal.

 

This is my take away and my encouragement is this: don’t give up. While I know that it is great if you can “win” the event, like I said, the goal is just to get you to write. So, just write. And, if you still want to do 50000 in 30 days, do it. It doesn’t have to be in November. You can do it at any time. Just write.

 

Well, I just wanted to give a small update so here it is. Have a great one everybody!

 

 

It’s NANOWRIMO Time!

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It is that time again. I have decided to participate this time. I have tried this a couple of times before, but didn’t do all that well. So, I am going to try again.

For those of you that don’t know, NANOWRIMO is short for National Novel Writing Month. It is an annual event in which participants try to draft a full novel over the month of November. In the context of this it is a minimum of 50,000 words. This translates to about 1,670 words a day. You “win” by making your word count.

I have been setting on a story idea for some time and I figured this was the best way to complete a draft. I have also decided that I am going to do a writing blog during this process. I don’t know if I am going to write every day, but I will try to update every week. Since this has just started, and I finished writing for the day, I felt it was also a good time to start the blog. So here I am.

One of the keys to a successful NANOWRIMO is to prepare ahead of time. As I said, I have been setting on this idea for a while, so I already had most of the characters thought up and the basic outline written down. I got everything in place so that I could hit the ground running. As such I am in a pretty good place. First day of writing is done and I am at almost 2,000 words. I feel like it is a really good start.

Since I have the whole story outlined, I might jump around. In the past I have written chronologically, meaning I wrote chapter by chapter in order. I will probably do that again just because it is what I know, but if the mood hits me I might jump around. The important thing is I don’t want to lose too much steam. 

I am early in the writing process, day 1 to be precise. I know the excitement will be strong for the next few days, even this first week. But I will come to a point when I might have to force myself to write. If that happens, then I am going to need a way to keep focused. If that means skipping to an exciting part of the book, then I will. I want to finish this year, no matter what.

So, this is the first post of this series. Wish me luck!