Last Day!

Well, today marks the last day of NaNoWriMo 2010. It's been an awesome month for me and many others in my region. Several have reached 50k and beyond, however there have been some who were struggling for one reason or another. It's hard trying to find ways to keep everyone motivated. I'm hoping that I will see everyone participate again next year.

Since finishing my own novel, I've gone back to fill in the blanks of several parts of the story that I felt needed to be fleshed out. I'm already getting a head start on the editing. I was even considering what I want to do for a cover. I still haven't really figured out a title for the book yet. I've already gone through the first three chapters (well, I had to break up the story as best I can into chapters), trying to revise and enhance some weak spots. This is my first time ever editing a novel, so all of this is a learning experience for me. I'm learning a lot of new things when it comes to writing in manuscript format. A lot of this stuff I've forgotten since grade school English class. It's a nice refresher.
I actually find editing my novel pretty fun to do. I get to envision my story and the characters even clearer now that the words are all out on the paper. It definitely helps me to figure out what might be missing. Doing a little each day is helping me find new things in the story. So far, with the current manuscript format I've done, I have over 200 pages. Not bad for a 50k novel. It's amazing what margins, spacing and 12-point Courier really does.

50k Goodness

I finally hit 50k as of yesterday afternoon. It was a very long and tiresome road the entire way through. I'm not going to stop writing, though. I feel as though I left a lot of things out of the story that I wanted to tell/retell. I'm not going to delete the words I've written, though. I'm going to be adding new words in red letters. December will be the time for deletions :)
At least now I can really relax on my 3k wordcount and just concentrate on getting the recommended 1667. The main bulk of my story has been told, so now, it's just time to go back and fill in those details (or rewrite them in red). This will sort of be my pre-editing to December's editing. Won't that be fun...

Part of me regrets not having a full-blown outline. There were times I was stuck as to what I should be writing next. I wanted to tell everything, but I kept getting overwhelmed to the point I just get writer's block. I can understand why people outline, but it seems almost 99.999% of the time, they end up pretty much deviating from the intended outline and writing something complete different than intended. That's certainly not a bad thing, but I think it's good to have that outline there for reference, at least -- just in case you get those sudden moments of writer's block of trying to figure out what sequence to tell next.

NaNoWriMo 2010 has been a success so far hitting 50k, but I'm going to enjoy every day of it all the way to the very last day and continue writing to my heart's content!

NaNoWriMo 2010 - Week 2

I can't believe it's still only week 2 of the NaNo madness. It really seems like it's been longer. I suppose that's both a good and bad thing. So far, things have been going well with my story. I'm meeting and exceeding my daily wordcount quota. At this rate, according to the website, I will finish approximately on November 16th. I think this time I will keep writing even after I've met the 50k goal. I will just relax on the daily wordcouts a bit. The words are starting to flow more easy now since I've reached one of the exciting points that I've been anxious to write. Now that I'm at the 30k mark, I can lay off the extra "fluff" and actually start writing the rest of the story with ease without the fear of finishing the story before I reach the 50k mark. I only have about 13k words left to go before I hit 50k, so I can definitely start revealing more exciting things quickly now.
As for the story itself, it's taken a completely different turn from what I originally planned. I noticed this was a common thing for everyone in my writing group, also. It's funny how after all those long hours of planning, you end up writing something totally different! I suppose that's a good thing. In my case, the story got flipped upside down and sideways. One of the main characters of my story is now blind. I never even planned to have a blind character in this story, but it seemed to work out perfectly and really make him my most favorite character in the story now!

Being an ML has been great, also! I'm not as nervous as I was in the beginning. Planning the write-ins have been smooth for the most part. My only concern was figuring out where to have them. People have made some great suggestions, and it's really hard to pick one. We ended up having two writing sessions per week: one on Sundays and another (shorter) one on Tuesdays, where we do wordsprints. The write-ins and wordsprints have been extremely helpful for everyone. I'm trying to be a good motivator for everyone who might be lagging behind in their wordcounts. I'm really glad to see that everyone's progressing. Best of all, there have been some great friendships that have come out of these meetings! It would be great to do these sort of write-ins all year round, even after NaNoWriMo is over.

I've been considering trying out Script Frenzy in April. It would be a great opportunity to finally write out those scripts for some graphic novels I've been putting off on drawing these past few years.

Onward to week 3!

Progress Update

Day 4 has been a success so far. So far I have 13,336 words so far. I've been keeping up with my daily 3k+ wordcount, which is a good thing, though I've found it difficult at times to really get into a good writing flow. I've been cutting it pretty close to meet the goals each day, but I've had to force myself to stay disciplined in that aspect. I hope the upcoming write-in will get me a little more creative and motivated.

My problem is that I know the story I want to tell, however, I know that if I tell it too fast, then it will be well below 50k when I'm done, and I would rather have the story unfinished at 50k than tell the whole thing and try to think of 'fillers'  just to meet the wordcount. I did something similar to last year's story whenI managed to meet the wordcount then just finished it with a 'summary' on how it ended. Of course, I intend to go back and fill in the details of that later once I get the time.

Overall, things are going smooth enough for me to keep up with this sturdy trend of wordcounts and story pace that I won't fall behind, nor will I run out of things to write about. I am eager to tell certain parts of the story, but I want to spend enough time building up for it first. I'm sure I will be doing a lot of trimming when it's all said and done, though.

Onward to day 5 and beyond!

The Final Hours!

NaNoWriMo is quickly approaching in a few hours. Today's kickoff party at Barnes & Noble went very well. There were six of us in total who showed up, but there are more people in the region who are participating. I will be going out tonight to partake in some midnight NaNoWriMo as I meet and greet another fellow writer in the area. I think this will be a fun adventure! This will be my first-ever NaNoWriMo in which I actually wrote on November 1st. Last year, I started about 12 days into it.
As I await the final few hours, I'm doing some last-minute preparations and outlining for when the madness begins. I'm so nervous and excited! Good luck, everyone on NaNo 2010!

Last Week

So now we've arrived at the home-stretch for when NaNoWriMo officially begins in less than a week. I'm really not too nervous about writing my project. What I am nervous about is me possibly undertaking this ML position head-on. This year our region has a few newcomers to the scene, and I want to make sure their first experience is enjoyable so that they would be inclined to want to do it again next year. My greatest challenge so far has been trying to coordinate with everyone's schedules so that these meet-ups will cater to as many as possible. Of course, I would also like to schedule more than one meetings per week if possible to cater to those who have weird schedules but really want to participate. It's a difficult endeavor to tackle alone, especially when you have your own schedule to keep up with, as well, but I will just hold my breath and hope for success next month!

Outline Revisited

It's about time I revisit my NaNo outline again. I was looking around for some Novel writing/outling software to see if any of them would be of use to me, but it's taking me quite a bit of time to play with the different software and learn how to even use the things! I'm not sure if I even need one. I just wanted to try and see if it makes the writing process that much smoother, or does it cause more harm than good. My idea of 'outlining' has been writing down notes in Notepad/Wordpad. I know that's probably a horrible way of doing things, but then again I'm a weird person with a weird way of organizing my thoughts. I like to venture out every so often and see if there are ways to make things easier.

So far, the two programs I've tried have been yWriter and Storybox. I wanted to try and get yWriter on my eeePC since it uses a Linux environment, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to install software on that computer. Despite me having my eeePC for almost 2 years now, I am still Linux-challenged. The Windows version of yWriter looks very intimidating. There's just so many places to put information, it almost looks a little too organized for me. Storybox looked like a neat little program to try, but again, I was left with the same thing. So many places to fill in the blanks and not really sure how to fill them in properly so I don't get confused.

I would like to check out LiftLift and FocusWriter (though I think the latter is more for when NaNoWrMo actually starts) next and see how those are. It would be really good if these programs came with a sample file with the information filled in so I can get a general idea of how to do things. I tend to learn things faster when there are templates/samples so the program interface doesn't seem so intimidating.