NaNoWriMo - Day 4

Still behind today, after a restless morning and an afternoon pondering how to handle an educational matter.

I had intended to start writing early, while the girls and their Dad were out at Ju-Jutsu. I ended up helping the boy with his homework.

I didn't get started until late tonight, and I'm literally falling asleep as I write. Hopefully I'll get to work on my novel tomorrow morning, because I have company coming by in the afternoon.

Good night all!

NaNoWriMo - Day 3

After two days of staying ahead of my goal, I've fallen behind. It's OK. I had a productive day in several other ways, and I spent a good part of the day with friends.

My word count is now 4,136 words, where I should be just over 5,000 (6,668 by midnight, tonight.) As you can see from the graphic, I'm sleepy at the moment. I'm going to take a quick nap, and hopefully
I'll wake up with a good bit of energy.

I'm going to echo the advice of fellow writer Jennifer Walker: if you're doing NaNoWriMo make sure to write something every day. Even if life gets on the way you'll feel better if you can dash out a few words!

NaNoWriMo - Day 2

Work continues! I was able to update some floor plans for the house where my protagonist lives, and then I sat and wrote another 1723 words.That puts me ahead for a second day, but only just slightly.

According to the NaNo progress meter, wrimos like me in Montreal have written 557,276 words so far. How are you doing?

Happy writing!

NaNoWriMo - Day 1

So I'm tackling NaNoWriMo this year! I signed up last year with the best of intentions, but then life got in the way and I never ended up writing a single word. This year is going better, already.

I didn't have as much time to outline my novel as I would have liked, but this particular story is one I've been mulling over for a few years now. I managed to put a rough outline together, and I took time to revamp a couple of the characters. I also dropped the original setting (a real town) and am creating a fictitious town in a slightly different location, based loosely on the real town but with a history I've cobbled together from real and imagined events.

I am not nearly finished with my outlining, but was able to go ahead with my first day of writing anyway. As you can see from the neat graphic above, I wrote 1915 words today, which means one successful day and also one day in which I surpassed my goal of 1667 words.

I am building the outline in layers, loosely following Randy Ingermanson's snowflake method. I like the way one layer of work builds upon the previous layer, and then contributes to the next one.

For those who are interested in the technical mechanics of writing (the act of recording the words, not the composition itself) I'm using a book writing template produced for OpenOffice. I had originally considered getting software made for writing fiction, but so far this seems quite adequate and it's also free! I've tweaked the template styles slightly, and added extra details into the sections for characters, settings and items. I also added a to do list at the very beginning.

It was a good day, but I'm not done yet. I'm off to work on some of those details that need filling in, and then it's supper with the family.

If you're doing NaNoWriMo and want to add me as a writing buddy, you can find me at ruby3881. Happy novel writing!