Category Archives: NaNoWriMo

nanowrimo day 4 – oh, boy.

Books, NaNoWriMo, Writing

So this is when it gets hard.  That didn’t take long.

I just finished the second chapter, and boy was it a tough one.  My main character gets put on trial for something she didn’t do, and things have to get really bad in order to get her in the right place to make the rest of the novel happen.  I spent the last two days putting it off, either not writing at all or writing things that weren’t the actual trial.

As it turns out, I hate the idea of writing dialogue for characters I don’t like, especially when they’re doing bad things to my protagonist.  The scene required Bad People to do and say Bad Things, but I just couldn’t bring myself to make it happen.  (I even invented a new character so that my other main character would have someone reasonable to talk to while witnessing the whole thing.)  Fortunately, once I realized this, I did what any good WriMo writer would do: I called in the space monkeys.

Continue reading →

nanowrimo day 2 – on target!

Books, NaNoWriMo, Writing

I just finished my first chapter over lunch, and I’m now ahead of the curve for the second day. (Yay!) I don’t think I mentioned my other evil plan for writing this month: my novel has been carved into 15 chapters, so each day either involves opening a chapter or closing one. (My original outline called for 14 chapters, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch.)

Continue reading →

and so it begins

Fun, NaNoWriMo

I wrote my first line this morning:

“Harmony Miller, that is the most ludicrous thing I ever did hear!”

I had intended to write it last night just after midnight, but I ended up falling asleep well before then.  Hopefully writing will keep me awake longer than reading.

Not sure how often I’ll blog about the experience. Writing 2000 words a day will either leave me a) not wanting to write another word, or b) anxious to write something other than bad fiction.  We’ll see.  Today, a few rules I set for myself:

Continue reading →

NaNoWriMo blog team go!

Fun, Literature, NaNoWriMo, Science fiction

K and I are going to give National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a try this year. It goes something like this: starting on November 1st, each of us has to write a 50,000-word (175-page) novel by midnight on November 30th. It’s not as crazy as it sounds; hordes of people finish every year, mostly by lowering their expectations from ‘bestseller’ to ‘will not make someone vomit’ (in the words of one of the organizers).

You can follow our progress along the way by visiting our NaNoWriMo pages; a handy pair of links is included in the sidebar here. I’m not sure exactly what they’ll contain, but at the very least it’ll include up-to-date word counts. If you decide (due to some mad urge) to join us and write a novel of your own, let me know your author URL and I’ll add it to the links.