Post-Nano Thoughts

So I wrote for Nanowrimo in November.  Sort of.

As you may recall, I planned to continue a story I had already started writing, in fact, one I had already tried to Nano once (back in 2015).  I first had to convert all the hand-written pages to computerese.  This took rather more time than I had thought it would, partly due to lousy handwriting (even I can't read my own writing), partly due to lousy storage resorting in blocks of text being mostly erased, and partly due to the fact that I am really, really lazy.  It took me, in fact, until November 15th to actually start writing new text.

That pretty much guaranteed I wasn't going to win, so it couldn't have worked out better if I had done it on purpose.  I still managed to write about 1200 words a day.  The busiest day was November 19th, with 1631 words; the least busy was probably November 25th, with 388 words.  My total words for the 15 days I wrote were 15 614 words.  This not only doubled the length of the manuscript, it also set a new personal record for Nano, as  previously I wrote 12 279 words (that was 2017).

One of the reasons for the slow-down in the middle (a three-day period November 24-26) was that I was hit with a surprise romance sub-plot (okay, it wasn't that much of a surprise) and decided to include a somewhat explicit sex scene.  You know, to stretch my writerly muscles, leave my comfort zone, that sort of thing.  And when I look back at it, you know, it was really pretty terrible.  The best news is that no one but me will ever read it.  Should I ever show the manuscript to anyone else, I will make sure to delete that scene first.  Of course, first I would have to finish it.  There seems little risk of that.

So, yeah.  That was my NaNoWriMo for 2018.  I don't do well with goals that require a certain number of words per day; I do better with a certain amount of time spent writing per day.  My goal now is to write for 15 minutes each day.

The People Have Spoken!

The poll to determine which genre I should fail to finish in this year's Nanowrimo is now closed, and the overwhelming winner was . . . (drum roll, please!) . . . Space Opera!!!

So I have decided to try to finish the one space opera story I seem to have in me:  the one I started back in 2004.   "But," I hear you say, "this is a story that you have already done who knows how many words of.  Isn't that cheating on Nano?"

Yea.  Yes it is.  Next question?

"But you've already written who knows how many words!  Is there any doubt you will finish it?"

Trust me, I can fail to finish this one big time.  I've been sitting on it since 2004, after all, and  haven't finished it in 14 years.  Moreover, I tried using this one for Nano back in 2015 and then I wrote . . .  hang on, this is tough math . . .  a grand total of . . .  zero words.  So trust me, I can do this.

So my only prep for this is to make sure I have all the original pages translated from (badly) handwritten to recorded on the word-processor of my choice -- What?  Oh, yes.  You in the back.

"What if you finish the story in less than 50 000 words?"

I don't think you've seen how far I can drag a story out, given the motivation.  I'm sure I can get 50k out of what plot is left (to be honest, the action hasn't even started.  It might never).  But, should the story actually get finished in fewer words than I need, I have a few options.  One is that I can just take it as a loss (but just quitting feels wrong.  For my pride, if for no other reason, I ought to fail due to my own incompetence).  Another is to write something else to fill in the gaps, and to be honest, I have an idea in the back of my head, inspired by, of all things, a line in a Ron Sexsmith song.  So we'll see.

Help Me to Help you to help me to . . . wait, I'll come in again.

It is now October, and Nanowrimo is only one month away.  

As ever, I plan to enter Nano this year, and as ever, I will fail to finish. But since I failed to finish last year due to not being prepared enough, this year I want to prevent that. But before I can do any prep or worldbuilding or anything, I need to decide which genre I will fail at. Help me out! Take the poll below!

Please select one or more choices, up to four, and list them in the comments.  If you do choose more than one, please rank your choices from 1 (the genre or subgenre you would most like to see me fail to finish Nanowrimo with) to 4 (the one you would least like to see me fail to finish Nanowrimo with). Management retains the option to ignore all suggestions. Void where prohibited by law. Burma Shave.

The choices are:

Urban Fantasy

Romantic Urban Fantasy

Heroic Fantasy (typified by Conan)

High Fantasy (typified by Tolkien)

Space Opera

Horror

Mystery

Urban Fantasy Mystery

Romantic Urban Fantasy Mystery

Other (your choice)

So, yeah, a long silence means that I basically gave up on winning Nano this year.  A few days of bad sleep, weather changes, and the accompanying migraines and lack of energy did me in.  So I've reorganized:  I'm going back to what works for me, which is to write for a set length of time every day instead of trying for a set word-count.

I am planning to continue on with the same story, bad though it may be, and I am going to continue plugging my totals into the Nano website, because why not?  I won't be finishing on time, but I plan to plug on until either I finish this story, or it finishes me.

376 words today, by the way.


Current music:  Sex without Love/Ben Lee

Took A Mulligan

Wrote about 500 words at dinner at work.  Done for the day.  Puts me behind, but hey, who's surprised by that?

Enough with the cutsie titles already!

So for the third day of Nanowrimo, I managed 1679 words.  Total wordage for three days is 5081, and I am dead on target to finish on the 30th (reaching 50 000 words, that is.  Whether the novel will be done then remains to be seen).

I'd like to get ahead a bit, but I don't know if that's actually possible.  Maybe on the weekend I can write a bit more.

Maybe on the weekend I can sleep less than 16 hours a day.

No, Nay Nano No. 2

So my total for the second day was 1733 words, giving me about a one-hundred word buffer, but things are going a bit smoother.  I still need to grab some time and decide how big the ship really is and how many people are aboard, and maybe do a rough map of the interior, but people are starting to find their voices and the captain finally has a name, albeit not until page six.  The first chapter will eventually need major editing.

No, Nay, Nano!

So I've decided to do Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) this year, in an effort to get myself writing again.  I finished my last complete project sometime in 2010, and my last incomplete in 2012, and neither of those got a good reaction from my readers.  So, try, try again.

My project is an SF story with romantic overtones, or a romance with SF overtones, or possibly a grand mess with no overtones at all.  I'm not even sure what an overtone is, in this case. 

So far, writing on the 1st of November, I've written 1669 words, which is 2 words more than the minimum necessary to finish by the end of the month.  We'll see how things go.