NaNoWriMo success story!

NaNoWriMo is long over, and I've stalled halfway through the research I need to complete before I do my first round of revisions.  For the most part it's simply because I've been too busy and the novel was one of the first things to get left by the wayside, but I'm trying to rein in my out-of-control schedule now so that I can once again devote some time to researching and revising my novel.

A recent post on a blog I follow provided some motivation.  Jessica Burkhart is the author of the Canterwood Crest series for horse-crazy tween girls, but she's also a wrimo (what NaNoWriMo participants are usually called around the site and forums).  Here you can read about how she wrote the first book of the series as a NaNo novel.

I understand what she means about a first draft being "ugly" after NaNoWriMo is over!  I feel like my novel has good bones -- I think I successfully captured the story and the general feel that was in my head -- but I also feel like I need to research certain details and develop certain aspects of the story a little more.

I don't necessarily want the same sort of success Jessica Burkhart found -- I'm less interested in traditional publishing, and leaning more toward digital self-publishing -- but I still find her story encouraging!

If you didn't make 50k... don't feel bad

Because certain published authors didn't get there, either.

Patrick Rothfuss, the author of The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, posted on his blog about a week into November that he was doing NaNoWriMo.  It was a long post about how he had thumbed his nose at NaNoWriMo in previous years, and it seemed like his reasons for finally deciding to participate boiled down to, "The fuck I can't."

Recently he posted again, about how he had failed to reach 50k, which was quite funny because of how "riled up" (his own words) he was in the previous post.  He also posted about all the things he got out of participating.  As he put it, he wrote 35k that he might not have (or at least not all of it) if he hadn't participated.  He also said that he learned a lot, such as how much he can write in one hour, and that he doesn't need to block off three or four hours of time in order to get any writing done.

Great lessons, for all of us.

But really, don't feel bad if you didn't get to 50k.  The real success is that you wrote anything at all, which is likely more than you would have written otherwise.  And if it still really grates on you that you didn't make it to 50k, well, there is always next year!

Farewell, NaNoWriMo 2011

I am glad I won this year, but I sure am sad to see NaNoWriMo go.  We'll probably be having at least one TGIO (thank God it's over) party or meeting in the coming week or two, but I'm not really glad it's over — I loved how it kept me motivated throughout the month.  I don't know if I necessarily want or need to be writing 2,000 words or more every day on a regular basis, but it did get the job done.

Which reminds me — not only did I finish NaNoWriMo (i.e., got to 50k), but I also finished the novel (more or less).  I wrote 1,283 words Tuesday night and put an ending on it — not several thousand like I'd been hoping for, so I may actually complete the first draft just shy of 80k, but I can always expand later if it needs it.  I have one more scene to write — something I skipped over a few weeks ago, when I wasn't sure what to write, so I just skipped it and kept going — and last night I added 582 words of that scene.  Unfortunately, that was after midnight, so my final NaNo count stayed at 53,557.

Today I'll finish the skipped scene — perhaps a few hundred more words — and then I'll set the novel aside for a little while before I start revisions.  On the question of whether to start Book 2 right away, I've realized that I need to do a little more research anyway, since I'm going to be including some real events in the story, so I'm going to start on that next.

My husband had a good point: If I start on Book 2 before I start revisions of Book 1, I may realize where I want or need to make changes in the first book to make the story flow better, or to make something in Book 2 work better.  So I think, once I am done with the research, I will start writing Book 2, and see where it's going before I go back and make revisions on the first one.  I'm planning to start revisions sometime in January.

The good news is, if all goes well, I may be releasing Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box sometime in the spring or early summer — if I stick with my original plan of self-publishing, of course, but at the moment I don't foresee that changing, since I want control over my own book covers (because of the 1920s images) and book promotion.

I'd love to hear from others.  How did NaNoWriMo go for you?  And do you have any plans to publish?

Word warring and winning

It's amazing how motivating a good old-fashioned word war contest between two friends can be!  I convinced a friend of mine — a published author, John Beachem — to do NaNoWriMo this year, and at first I was amused that my word count stayed consistently pretty far ahead of his.  This was partly because I started the month with flying colors, and partly because he spent time rewriting what he'd already written about a week in.





He started catching up with me around when my daily pace started flagging, and that made me nervous enough to jump start my writing drive again.  Last night, I got to 50k before he did, though he was only 500 words away when he quit for the night, so he easily could have beaten me if he'd kept going!  Not that I'm complaining...

It feels good to be a winner!

I stopped last night with 51,119 NaNo words (75,119 total words in the novel), for a total of 2,562 words written yesterday evening.  I think I probably have a few thousand words left to write before the novel is finished, plus I need to go back and fill in a scene I skipped, which will probably be another couple thousand words.  In other words, I should be a little over 80k by the time I'm done with the first draft, which will hopefully be in another couple of days!

Restoring my rapidly narrowing lead

I've had an impossibly busy week, and as a result, not a lot of time to work on my novel.  As a result, there have been several days when I've not had a chance to write at all, and several others where I've failed to meet NaNoWriMo's daily minimum goal (1,667 words).  You'll see it when you look at my calendar widget in the sidebar (which is working again) — whereas it used to be almost all green squares and just one yellow (which means I wrote some but not enough), now there are 7 yellow squares and 3 red squares (which mean no writing at all).

One of those yellow squares is today's, however, and I plan to change its color to green before the day is out.  Our 24-hour write-in for the weekend was canceled, which is too bad because I and a lot of others were really looking forward to it.  Tonight, however, is the last of the Friday write-ins I've been going to at our local 24-hour used bookstore and coffee shop.  I plan on staying extra late and trying to recover some of my rapidly narrowing lead: Whereas I did at one time have a 5-day lead, right now I'm only about a day ahead, and that's only because I've already written 1,000 words or so today.

My word count goal for the day is 4,000 words — I'm already a quarter of the way there, but cross your fingers that I'll make it the rest of the way tonight!

Exciting news!

I'm just back after a weekend of nothing.  I didn't write either Saturday or Sunday, but I did finally sit down tonight and add 2,818 words to my novel.  I am at a critical point in the story and needed to hurry up and write some more to keep the momentum going.

I am fast approaching the climax now, and will have to figure out how exactly that is going to go.  I have a general idea, but hadn't yet decided on the specifics.  I think I came up with a few good ideas tonight.  My ideas for the next book are gelling as I get further along in the story, too, and I may actually be able to start writing that one right away when I finish my first draft of Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box.  I'll decide then whether or not I need a break from Ruby's world for a little while, or whether I am ready to jump right into the next novel.

My biggest news, however, is that I am finally ready to unveil Victor!  I was waiting for the photograph to arrive, and it is finally here.  So now you all get to see what I picture when I imagine my heroine's vampire heartthrob!

I will post his photo tomorrow!

NaNoWriMo's calender widget is broken!

If you've noticed over the last few days that my NaNoWriMo calendar widget suddenly turned all red, that's because apparently something is broken on the site.  My statistics page, with my word count graph, isn't updating correctly either.

It's probably nothing more than coincidence that my first few slow days happened to occur at the same time as the calendar widget broke... right?

I didn't work on my novel at all on Wednesday, primarily because that's when I moved my newest horse to my barn.  Yesterday was quite busy too (riding lesson, work in the afternoon, and book club in the evening) but I did manage to write 599 words in the evening, bringing my NaNoWriMo word count to 37055.  (I'll wait to update tonight, since only the first update per day seems to be showing on the graph, and with the write-in tonight I should have a big increase in my word count before midnight.)

If the calendar widget doesn't get fixed soon, I'll switch to a different (operational) word count widget!

Fun with Auto Summarize

If you need a good laugh sometime, try using Word's "Auto Summarize" feature on your novel.  Just remember to save your novel first, and have it open the summary in a new document!

The shorter the summary, the funnier it is.  According to Word, this is my novel in 10 sentences:

"Victor?" "Victor?" Victor nodded. Victor smiled. Victor.
"Victor."
"Victor. "Victor!" "Victor!" "Victor!

I think I'll be laughing about this one for a while yet.

May the frog be with you!

W.C. Frog says, "May the (word count) frog be with you!"

I am thrilled with my progress so far on my novel.  I had a moderately productive weekend — last night (counting my words after midnight) I got to 31k (31,099 to be exact).  Attending a write-in Friday evening helped me surpass my personal goal of 2k per day with 2,353 words.  Although Saturday is my busiest day, and I just generally assume I won't have time to write, I did at least make the NaNo minimum goal with 1,695 (you have to write 1,667 words a day in order to get to 50k in a month).  Yesterday was wildly productive, with 2,302 words before midnight and 867 after — a total of 3,169 words in one day.

All in all, that makes the weekend (counting Friday night as part of the weekend) a 7,217-word weekend — not far from the 8k weekends that the NaNo Powers That Be are always recommending as a good way to catch up.

Of course, I don't need to do any catching up — at this point I'm nearly 5 days ahead of schedule, which is just fine with me considering my tendency in past years to neglect my novel around Thanksgiving.

I'm also officially two-thirds of the way done with my total word count, at least if my goal remains 80k.  As I get closer to the end, I might revise that up to 90k — we'll see.  It's a lovely feeling to be this far through my novel and still have the feeling of being swept away with it!  I love my characters, I love the story, I love the ideas that I'm getting for future books in the series.

To all others doing NaNoWriMo, may the frog be with you!

Rockin' along

I am thrilled to say that I am really rocking the novel this year.  Maybe it's that I have solid plans to publish this one; maybe it's the excitement and inspiration generated by things like using 1920s images for my characters and listening to a lot of 1920s music.  Who knows.  All I know is that I'm having my most successful NaNoWriMo ever.

Last night I broke 20,000 words.  I am very nearly halfway done with my 50k goal for November, and three days ahead of where I should be.  I'm also more than halfway through with my total word count goal for the novel, 80k, though there are times when I think it may end up being longer, maybe 90k.

There are times when I feel like I'm struggling, such as during the first 1,500 or so words last night.  But I'm finding that if I push through, everything falls into place.  Part of it is this particular novel, or perhaps more accurately, how much I'm feeling this particular novel.  If I just make myself keep writing, eventually it all starts coming together.

This is a glaring difference from previous years.  Every year since 2007, I've failed miserably — some years I hardly even got a word count at all.  Other years I started writing and couldn't keep up.  Even the one year I did win, 2006, it was by the skin of my teeth.  I finished my novel at just 100 words over 50,000, and that was after a superhuman effort to catch up.

But this year, I have hope that I will not only reach 50k, but also finish my novel (at around 80k), so that I can set it aside for a month or so before I start revisions in January!

NaoWriMo word count widget in sidebar

NaNoWriMo still hasn't rolled out their word count widgets, so... I got tired of waiting, and found the code in an old blog post from a few years ago.  Turns out the widgets are still there, they just run off of our old participant numbers instead of our usernames (like they are supposed to this year — IF they are ever rolled out!).  So my calender widget is now in the sidebar!

Now to go make today's box turn green!

Life after NaNoWriMo

I know, I know, it's only November 8th — way too soon to be thinking ahead to when NaNoWriMo is over.  But even though I'm frantically pounding out words, I've had a big picture in mind for this (and subsequent) novels for months, so I found these articles interesting.

It all started with an article in an email newsletter I get, about whether NaNoWriMo is beneficial.  The article assumes that you're following the NaNoWriMo rules, of course, by starting a fresh novel on November 1st, rather than continuing work on a current project and just counting the words you write in November.

I think I may write a lot faster than many people, because 1,667 words each day doesn't normally take that long, so when I'm reading an article like this I don't understand what the big deal is.  At the word war Friday night I wrote 1,400 words in 30 minutes, which surprised me — I've long thought that 1,000 words in an hour was a fairly average pace for me, but I guess I can do much better than that when inspiration hits.  I may also have gotten faster over the years, since I would consider last night to be on the slow side of average (I was struggling somewhat with the scene), and I wrote 1,500 words in an hour.

Anyway, from this first article I clicked on two more links, and found some that were even more helpful.  One was about what to do after NaNoWriMo, if you want to eventually publish the novel, that is.  The article recommends taking a break first, then going back and revising when it's no longer so fresh in your head.  That's pretty sound advice — Stephen King says pretty much the same thing in On Writing.

I've been planning on taking a break for a month or two after I finish my first draft, and working on something else until I pick it back up to revise.  Maybe I'll finish last year's NaNo novel, which has been languishing, forgotten, in a drawer for all this time.  Or maybe I'll rework my first (and only) completed NaNo novel, which I wrote back in 2006.  It's a great idea and I've wanted to go back and turn it into something really good, I just haven't ever gotten around to it.  It means that it'll be a little longer before anyone gets to read Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box (other than my husband and friends who are helping me to revise and polish it), but I don't want to rush it into publication until it's truly ready.  You'll just have to be patient!

One other article I found was this handy little summary of genre novel rules.  A couple of weeks ago I'd been looking for this very information, wanting to know whether my target total word count of 80,000 was a good length.  It's definitely a little on the short side, but still within the requirements — and as I get further into the novel and flesh the story out a little more, I'm thinking it may actually be more like 90,000.

What about you?  What are your plans for your NaNo novel?

Do you have time to write on weekends?

This weekend was a moderately successful one for me.  A lot of wrimos try to achieve astronomical word counts during this first weekend, but I was just trying to maintain a steady pace.  My Saturdays are ridiculously busy right now, so I suspected I wouldn't have time to work on my novel that day, and a lot of Sunday was spent on day-off kinds of things: sleeping in, hanging out at the bookstore drinking coffee, riding my horse, and watching a little TV.

Friday was my phenomenally productive day.  With the help of a write-in, my first-ever win at a word war, and a really late night, I pounded out 4,105 words before I went to bed.  Almost half of those — 1,798 — were written and updated to my profile after midnight, though, so they counted for Saturday instead of Friday.

Which was actually good, since — as I'd expected — I didn't have time to write on Saturday.  The timing makes it look on my graph like I did, though, which I like!

Sunday I didn't get around to writing until late in the evening, and then I only wrote 1,871 words, which means I didn't achieve my normal daily goal of 2,000 words either day this weekend.  That's all right, though — with 15,227 words in November, I'm still cookin' with a 2-day lead!

I updated my total word count in the sidebar, but so far NaNoWriMo hasn't yet rolled out the word count widgets this year.  When they do, I'll add my favorite widget, which is a mini-calender that will show green squares on days when I achieved the minimum (1,667 words), and red squares when I didn't.  So far I won't have a single red square on my widget!  Awesome!

W.C. Frog says, Good job!

I have decided to call my word count frog (from my goody bag the night of the kickoff party) W.C. Frog.  He's pretty happy right now because so far, I'm racking up some serious words.  I got to 1,678 at the kickoff party before leaving (even though I was so exhausted for that last few hundred that I was nearly seeing double), and last night I added another 3,384 for a grand total (for November) of 5,062.  If NaNoWriMo ever makes their word count widgets available, I'll put one in the sidebar with my overall word count status bar, so that you can see how far along I am in NaNo versus my total word count and overall goal.

The key to NaNoWriMo is getting ahead as much as you can at the beginning, so that when things interfere with writing later in the month — Thanksgiving, family obligations, and all the other little things that come up that you couldn't anticipate — you have a cushion to make up for those days when you don't get anything done at all.  That's where I've failed in previous years, and it's kept me from winning every year but my very first, 2006.

For some people, the weekends serve as a great time to get ahead on their word count, but for me it's usually the opposite — it's harder for me to work on my novel on the weekends, when my husband and I are usually pretty busy.

Of course, I have a pretty busy month ahead of me this year, but I am hoping to maintain (and hopefully even increase) my slim lead, so that when the craziness hits later in the month, I won't fall behind!

Live blogging the NaNoWriMo kickoff!

Internet connection is spotty, but I wanted to pop in from the NaNoWriMo kickoff.  There are tons of us here — not sure if we're going to surpass last year's count (which was 76 or 77), but if we don't I'll be surprised.  I think there are at least 50 of us on the side of the store where I'm sitting, and that's not counting the seating area right in front of the cafe counter and the "quiet reading" area on the opposite side of the store.

We're having the kickoff party at Fireside, a 24-hour used bookstore and coffee shop in South Denver, actually in the small city of Englewood in the south Denver Metro area.  This place is AWESOME and besides last year's kickoff party, I did numerous write-ins here last year, not to mention the occasional late-night writing session when I've had a deadline and needed some caffeine and a different environment in order to stay awake to finish.

Last year I came an hour early (at 9pm) to make sure I got a table for me and my friends, since I already knew the place and knew it was small.  I was glad I did, because a lot of people ended up sitting on the floor.  This year, I tried the same thing, but the place was already packed when I arrived — others had the same idea, after last year's craziness.

This quick iPhone picture doesn't show much of the store, but the entire place is equally as packed as in this picture, so it will give you an idea of how many people are here.

The MLs brought goody bags for everyone with NaNo stickers and a couple of little fun things in them.  This is my itty bitty frog buddy.  I've decided he is my word count frog.

Hello word count frog.  Please bring me lots of luck in NaNo this year!

NaNoWriMo countdown!

FIVE DAYS TO NANOWRIMO!

The kickoff party will be Halloween night, and I will be there, ready to start writing on the stroke of midnight!  Well, not start start, since I've already started work on this novel, but start my NaNoWriMo word count, specifically.

I've currently got a little over 19,000 words on my novel.  I was originally hoping to get to something like 30k before NaNo started, so that I could add 50k and finish my novel out around 80k.  Now I'm aiming lower.  I'm undecided on how long my novel should be, but I don't think I'll get to 80k, so if I start NaNo with 21 or 22k that will enable me to get 50k for the month before I run out of steam.

What else am I planning on doing before NaNo starts?  Obviously adding a couple thousand words before then won't be difficult, providing my life behaves, of course.  (No more days like yesterday, please, with lots of various forces conspiring to keep me busy running errands and such all day long!)

I also plan to work a bit more on my outline.  I know what I want to happen in the middle, and I have a vague idea of the end, but not much of the in-betweens.  I've been kind of winging it, so there are times when I get to the end of what I had planned, and think, Hmmm, what should happen next?  That's not conducive to writing quickly, so I need to make plans for how I'm going to fill in some of the holes in my plot!

NaNoWriMo: Finding time for 1,667 words a day

Since I'm doing NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, in November, I'll be trying to write at least 1,667 words every day (what it takes to get to 50,000 in a month).  This will be especially challenging because it sounds like I'll be starting an after-school nanny position on top of my regular freelancing.  My client work has slowed down a lot over the last year, especially this summer when I decided to work on my novel part-time and back off on client work.  Theoretically I should have enough time to do it all, but I'll have to get a little better about managing my time — I've gotten a little more susceptible to distractions in the past few years.

Yes, I'm looking at you, Facebook.

On average, I write about 1,000 words in an hour when I'm writing fiction, more if I'm really on a roll (and less if I'm stuck.  I probably need to set aside 2 hours a day for noveling during November if I want to meet my goal.  Add an hour or two for blogging and admin, an hour or two for client work (on average — the actual workload varies from week to week), and 4 hours or so for nannying (included commute time).  That adds up to at least 8 hours, which is fine, until you add horseback riding and sleeping in (I am so NOT a morning person) and various time-devouring monsters.

My conclusion: I will have to slay the monsters.  Or hide.  I wonder how hard it is to type when you are laying on your stomach under the bed?

I'm thinking I'll have to work out a schedule in order to keep myself focused and get all of this done.  Most of all I don't want Ruby to suffer!  I'd love to finish the novel by November 30th so that I can set it aside for a month or so before working on the first set of revisions.

Are you doing NaNoWriMo this November?  How do you make time for writing?

Ruby Ransome on NaNoWriMo

Although I've been working on Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box off and on for a few months (and conceived of the idea last November), I decided to work on it during NaNoWriMo this year.  Although it's not really true to the rules, I've worked on novels-in-progress during NaNoWriMo before.  For NaNoWriMo's purposes, I'll only count word count added during November — there will just be a second number, overall word count, that I'll keep tabs on as well.

For those of you who don't already know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month.  The idea is to write a novel (or at least the first 50,000 words of one) all in the month of November.  That works out to 1,667 words per day — a challenging pace to keep up when faced with weekends, holidays, work, and family obligations.  You're allowed to outline, research, write character sketches, etc. before NaNo starts, but you're not supposed to start writing until the stroke of midnight on Halloween.

While it might not seem sporting to work on a novel I've already started, I view NaNoWriMo as a tool to help me stay focused. I figure 50,000 words in November is 50,000 words in November, regardless of whether additional, non-NaNo words exist.  I do it because (even though I haven't achieved that elusive number for the past few years) I find that working on a novel with a bunch of other NaNo participants — doing meet-ups, write-ins, and meeting new writing buddies — helps motivate me to keep going.

I've set up my author and novel profiles on NaNoWriMo.org — click here to see my NaNoWriMo profile, or just click on the NaNoWriMo badge in the sidebar.  I haven't decided yet whether I'll include an excerpt from the novel in my profile, but if I do, it'll probably be the prologue.

I'm planning on attending the kickoff party this year, especially since it sounds like it will be held very near me, at my favorite 24-hour coffee shop and used bookstore.  Last year's kickoff party was great fun — I got to see some old friends (people I only ever see in November), and it's fun to stay up writing until the wee hours of the morning.  I can't wait!