NaNoWriMo's here again

It's November, which means it's NaNoWriMo time again.  This month also has Blizzcon, the Access Services Conference in Atlanta that I'm attending, and Thanksgiving, all of which may or may not cause time crunches that will affect opportunity to write.

Either way, the word count widget is up!

NaNoWriMo is coming!

Friday.

Camp NaNoWriMo

The folks at NaNoWriMo shifted Camp around this year, so it's running in April instead of Script Frenzy, which was axed for low participation.  I wasn't planning on doing anything for it, since it's April, school's in, and I'm going to a conference in the middle of the month.

And then I had a dream the other night that had a decent plot hook in it.  This happens fairly often, but April, unlike November, is a statistically bad month for me to be writing.  I do have a four hour layover in Chicago when I go to my conference, though, so I guess I'll see how it goes.

I set the goal at forty thousand words instead of fifty (you can do that for Camp!) since I've got that conference in the middle, and a lot of the stuff I write tends towards forty thousand or trilogies anyway.  Hopefully they'll get a widget together for it so I can add that here.

NaNoWriMo 2012

The word count widget is back.  Random sword & sorcery fantasy yet again.

NaNoWriMo - final chart

So I finished the story this year - both the requisite word count and the actual plot.  Final word count: 53623.  And in pretty pictures:

NaNo update

Due to not updating on the site or late daily updates, the graph on the NaNo site doesn't quite reflect my actual daily progress.  So here's another chart from the spreadsheet.  The vertical axis is in thousands.

NaNo to Date

I'll probably write some more this afternoon, so today's numbers will change.  But this is where it's at right now in pretty bar-graph format.

(No, those labels in the legend didn't get cut off.  Apparently that's how I have the column headings in my spreadsheet.)

NaNoWriMo 2011

I keep waiting for the word count widgets to go up on the NaNoWriMo site, but alas, no widgets yet.  I'm sitting at 10,075 words, and now I need to start making soup to freeze for work lunches.  And take out the garbage.  And I think I'm flirting with a migraine again, erg.

I made an outline for the story, but I'm sure at some point I'll need to ditch parts of it as twists occur in the writing.

Daylight Saving Time makes me groggy, regardless of which way the clock goes.

NaNoWriMo retrospective

Not surprisingly (well, to me), I hit about 35,000 words by the end of November. There are four reasons this isn't surprising to me.

• Five days in, I switched stories. The first one just wasn't doing it for me.
• This just isn't a 50,000 word story. I think it will top out at about 43,000. I realized that about the 27th.
• We're in the process of packing the apartment, which is a huge timesuck. (Also, the process of buying a house leaves one brain dead at certain stages.)
  
• I haven't been able to do 50,000 in a month since I started working fulltime. Thanksgiving weekend hurts more than it helps.

That said, I know more or less where this is going, unlike my previous two NaNo stories, so I'll probably keep writing through the end of it before skipping back to something else. I just need to get my characters out of the woods east of Lake Baikal and back to Istanbul, which is taking longer than I expected.

I don't think I'm going to try historical fiction for NaNoWriMo again; it takes too much work to do right (looking up the names and/or existence of towns in 1906, etc.) for something with a sharp deadline.

NaNoWriMo again

So it's NaNoWriMo time again. Not surprisingly, I have about 6 ideas to pick from, and I haven't decided yet.

I've got the spreadsheet set up, at least.

Stuff I use while writing:

• www.behindthename.com for names & meanings
• www.dictionary.com and its related thesaurus, though if I don't find what I'm looking for, I'll hit up the 20-volume OED at work
• Google maps if I'm working anywhere on earth for terrain, ground cover, and so forth
• Digital Collections & Archives from the Library of Congress, especially if I need archival maps (it was great for the story set in 1903)
• Wikipedia for most general knowledge stuff, like the history of the phonograph or when something was discovered/invented

Crud

NaNoWriMo has started sending me emails again. 10 days.

I'm not entirely sure what I want to do. The past two years I've started something entirely new. This year I don't know if I want to just pick whatever comes to mind Nov. 1, or if I want to start fresh with an old idea.

Specifically, with the concept of fractured time. Time fractured into parts running parallel to each other, but people in different geographic areas can only pass into others when times align, based on mathematical factors. I've tried starting it twice, and it hasn't gotten anywhere. I even did all the pretty math for it already.

Erg.

Gah

NaNoWriMo starts in like, 7 weeks. Gah.

Gah, because I don't know what I'm going to write this year. I don't really need a plot to start, but I need a character. Once I have a character to work off, I'm fine. I just don't have a new one in my head yet.

November is usually a good month for me, anyway.

How good? Have a chart:



"Live" is stuff I've started that I'm still working on to some degree. "Dead" I'm not planning on finishing (although sometimes I'll go back and read something and start working on it again). The green bars are the difference between the number of "live" stories and the number of "dead" ones, based on what month they're started in. The data go back to 1994. As you can see, November is like, my awesome month for starting stories, and stories started in July (or January, April, or October) are, by and large, doomed.