Day Five

Ended up skipping day four. Damn. Having finished a book of Clarke's short stories am feeling both inspired and disheartened. I can't write! What was I thinking? *wails and tears hair out* Today I have to write 3334 words. I don't think I have any.

Day Three

Hurrah! I have over 5000 words, which leaves me on schedule, as today's target is 5001. I'm hoping to have another bout of writing later on, if I can.

I'm not sure where my story is going. Everything it trotting along at a bit of a breakneck speed, and I am clearly at some point going to have to go backwards and pad, because I am running out plot too fast. I didn't have that much plot to begin with.

Oh well.

Day Two

I managed to break 2000 yesterday, with some struggle. Today I skipped past the rest of my prologue and headed straight in Chapter One, where things started flowing a bit better. I've finally got into the mindset of NaNo, which is just keep writing. No, I'm not writing brilliant award-winning sentences - that's what editings for. Just keep going. Let the story flow. Let the characters talk to you. Mistakes are irrelevant. The red and green squiggly lines make the page more colourful. And so forth. I've got 3,800 words,so I'm on target.

The word count thing on the side isn't working, but the Nano site is normally a bit slow and bitty for the first few days, so nevermind.

Day One

I hate my words. I hate all of them. ARGH. I have 1200 ish. That's not enough. I could write more but I hate what I've already written. You're not supposed to go back and edit, that's the whole point. I don't think I'm going to manage 10,000 words this weekend.

I bought coke and liquorice allsorts and some seeds and nuts.

Okay, I'll get back to it now.

N minus 1... oh god save me save save me.

Less than four hours to go. I am probably mad. I've decided not to do the staying-up-to-midnight thing, but get up at a sensible time and writing all day tomorrow. I seem to have signed up to a thing on the nano board to writte 10,000 words this weekend. One one hand - oh god. On the other, it would be nice to get a good chunk of writing done at the begining. On the third - shhh - it's not going to happen. So that's that.

N minus 3 (and counting)

I haven't forgotten this blog, honest. I've decided the snowflake method wasn't really working for me. (That sounds better than I gave up.) I'm still working out my story, just in my head. I'm looking forward to getting started.

Once November starts I'll post snippets here, and updates on how it's been going. And whether the middle part of my story ever turned up. That sort of thing.

N minus 9 ... missed a few days

Yesterday's step (Take another hour and expand that sentence to a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel.) turned out to be way to difficult. I'm not sure the middle of my plot exists yet. I'm halfway there. Ish.

Today's step was to create outlines of character storylines, which looks alot more helpful.

* The character's name
* A one-sentence summary of the character's storyline
* The character's motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?)
* The character's goal (what does he/she want concretely?)
* The character's conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?)
* The character's epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?
* A one-paragraph summary of the character's storyline


So that's tomorrow's task.