Nano - day twenty seven

Managed to punch out the 50k, whoo!

Feeling pretty good right now. The down side for me is that I didn't actually write a full novel, not the one I started at any rate. I did a rough outline at the end of October, and I got about a third of the way through the story.

But the goal was to crank out 50k words in November, more to get into the habit of writing than to write an award winning novel. Now comes the tricky part - to keep writing stories.

I like doing NaNoWriMo. Pretty sure I won't be able to do it next year due to anticipated work comitments, but we'll see how it goes.

NaNo - day twenty two

Yes! Just cracked the 40k mark. :)

As of writing this, I've got 40,053 words down. As noted earlier, Nano is more about quantity than quality, so I'm not going to be advertising this novel too seriously ... or anywhere. It started of as mainly a quest mission but I think I loaded too many targets into my story. The protagonists are seeking 30 items, and at the 4/5's mark they have collected eight.

I think I have more quest than novel. I may keep writing, but at this stage the plan is to stop when I hit 50k. I think there is too much in this story to get it all out in 50k words, but I'm not so invested in it that I am motivated to finish or polish it.

I do like what I did with a spreadsheet to lay out some groundwork, but I can see where I went wrong and didn't lay out enough. Having a blueprint definitely makes it easier to write. But I can see where I went wrong at the start and as a result, my story structure suffered for it.

I totally could re-write and fix it up, but like I said, I'm not that invested in the story (and between you and me, it's not that good). But it is a good opportunity to learn.

NaNo - day seventeen

As expected, so far nobody has asked about my progress on FB, so pretty sure I don't have too many FB friends that are into writing. No biggie, I wasn't expecting anybody to bite.

Progress report - today I'm at 32,000 words, which puts me about two days ahead of schedule. Brilliant! It's Saturday morning, so should be able to make good progress... BUT we have mud racing tonight (which means I should try and get some sleep during the day) and I'm working all day Sunday. #SadPanda

Looking at my spreadsheet, at one stage I was 4,300 words ahead of schedule, but then I had a run of bad days. On the plus side, despite the days I didn't write much, the lowest I got was 548 words ahead and never fell behind. That's with two days where I wrote zero words!

So far, looking good! :)

NaNo - day twelve

Yes! Just crossed 20k, roughly on target for day 12.

At one stage, I was 4,300 odd words ahead but I had a few bad days where I wrote very little. I started falling behinfmd but just managed to crawl back into ... on schedule.

If I can get a few days good writing in, I can get ahead again. My best single day was 2,900 words.

NaNo - day eight

Making okay progress, ahead of the goal so far. I find it really helps to have spreadsheet planned, with my characters, outlines, ideas and today I added a timeline (so I can track how far away events are, my story covers about a month and a half).

The anmoying thing is that I had an issue with the computer and I may have lost about a thousand words. *groan*

I'm  going to see if I can recover them tomorrow, if not... guess I'll have to try and re-write that section. Very glad I keep multiple versions of my stories, so that if a file gets damaged or corrupted, I've only lost part of my work, not all of it.

NaNo - Day 6

Numbering days is easy when the first of the month is day one. #CheesyGrin

Okay, so the goal count is about 1,670 words per day (or better). So for day six, I should be at or around 10,000 words.

My actual total is ... 12,823. Wooo! Ahead of schedule (so far)! Now admitedly, I am padding my story, and throwing in extra words that are superfluous. If I was editing this an actual "going to submit to publisher" story, I could easily edit out about 3,000 words (then do a proper edit and ditch another 2,000 or more).

Is this good story writing? Probably not... but it is more writing than I've done in the last ... ten years? Been a while. So hopefully I can maintain the momentum. You can always edit down and tighten up the prose, you can't fix what hasn't been written at all.

Side note about social media; I made a few posts about NaNo and got a few likes but no comments. So now I've stopped posting about it and I'll see if anybody is interested enough to ask how I am going.

NaNo - day one

Well, November is here again! I think I've set myself up for success as best I can this year. I had been hoping to crank out about 5,000 words today but I didn't get as much spare time as I'd thought.

Still, managed to get 2,186 words down - which is about 500 words over the daily target. So I'm still counting that as a win.

Story is starting out a bit slow, there's a fair bit of exposition I'm data dumping onto the poor reader. But NaNo is primarily about getting words down - trimming fat, tightening the prose and improving the story are all re-write and editing steps, not first draft steps.

That's my version and I'm sticking to it!
>.<