Yep, the badges in the sidebar prove it! I won at writing. I only “won” by 50 words, but I still won. Which is just another way of saying that I’m happy to report that I managed to write the 50k words necessary to be a NaNoWriMo winner. So, to wrap things up, here are a few thoughts and impressions:
Monthly Archives: November 2011
NaNoWriMo: Enter week 4
I can’t believe that this is the fourth week of NaNoWriMo. Last week was a real struggle for me. I wasn’t feeling well by mid-week and didn’t write for a few days. Going into the weekend, I was sure that I was going to stall out around 20,000 works or so. Somehow, I managed to pull through though and am now at about 33,000. I’m closer to my daily goal than I have been in a while.
Of course, this progress comes at a cost. I feel that I’m probably writing a series of decent-ish short stories that might be a novel on some distant planet. But does this worry me? Not a bit, not right now. I am determined to hit 50,000 words by the end of November.
The weekly write-ins that I have been attended are essential to my progress. I am guaranteed to crank out at least 3500 to 4000 words during one of these sessions. I hope that the holidays don’t derail me too much and I can stay on target. It’s pretty amazing to see that I only have 17,000 words left and to think, “Hey, I can do that!”
NaNoWriMo Update #2
Right now I’m at around 9500 words. My average per day word count is still about 600 words off. I managed to make up some ground last night be attending a write in at a local coffee shop. I was very happy to win one of the writing springs, managing to write about 1200 words in 20 or 25 minutes. So, I still behind, but still plugging away at it.
And, just a reminder that I’m writing in public. You can view the repository of the novel at GitHub. It’s not the easiest to read, but, then again, you could just use:
git clone git@github.com:brodieaustin/radio_quiet_novel.git
and read it that way!
NaNoWriMo Update #1
I thought that since the first “week” of NaNoWriMo is winding down that I should give a quick status report. Unfortunately, the news is a little depressing. I’m 5 days in and have over 40,000 words left to write! In the “stats” section of the website, I am told that I will not finish my novel until January 11, 2012.
Well, I set up this event in terms of overcoming fear. Now here I am, staring that fear right in the eyes. Off to write….
NaNoWriMo
I have wanted to participate in National Novel Writing Month for a few years now. Up until recently, I have had school and newborn babies on my hands–not conducive circumstances for blasting through a novel in a month. In fact, the last (and first and only) time that I wrote a novel, it took me about four months to draft it and I wasn’t working. A big part of NaNoWriMo is overcoming fear and jumping feet first into something daring, scary, and prone to producing garbage. In that spirit, I hope to add my 50k words worth of garbage to the world by the end of the month.
Part of overcoming the fear, for me, was to not fall back on old story ideas. I have had a number of ideas of longer stories or novels rattling around in my head for a while. Again, for one reason or another, they were only drafted in bits and pieces. I even considered for NNWM, reworking my rough draft of a novel. In the end, though, I felt that this would violate the spirit of the undertaking. And I really wanted to imbibe and embody the spirit of the thing.