NaNoWriMo 2012: a month in review

Words written on my novel: 81,685

Words written on other things: 19,508

Okay, that's the boring numbery part. Now I'll go on to the actual reviewing of the month.

NaNoFiMo: National Novel Finishing Month

National Novel Finishing Month (NaNoFiMo) is exactly what it says on the tin: a month-long "finish the novel" challenge. It's been running for a number of years, but various events led to the challenge moving to NaNoFiMo.proboards.com in 2011 and me ending up as assistant Admin. This year I'm once again more or less running the site, so I figure a blog post telling everyone how awesome the challenge is might be in order.

Blog Hop: The Next Big Thing

Earlier this month I was tagged by Nicole Tan, who is currently writing Trails of Destiny: The Elm Tree. The challenge? Answer ten questions about my current work-in-progress.

On the 21st of November.

Well, I'm only a couple of days late. I'll plead a combination of migraines and NaNoWriMo and go for it anyway.

NaNoWriMo Day 20: Parental guidance

So, this evening Dad told me he had nothing to read at the moment and wanted to know if I had anything with an ending lying around. He may have phrased it a little more kindly than that, but close enough. Then Mum commented that she'd been reading stuff on my old laptop and she remembered me saying that I had a complete version of Dark Star. I was left with nowhere to hide, so now my parents are going to read the first complete draft of a book I've been working on since 2002.

NaNoWriMo Day 19: The Great Train Heist

A bunch of minor characters are going to rob a train. Their plan is terrible and doomed to failure for all kinds of reasons involving physics, law enforcement and the fact that a couple of my main characters had to choose that particular moment get take a train trip.

"One team gets on at one station," one man said. "They blow the coupling and then just get off at the next station. Easy in, easy out. Nobody would suspect a thing."

"Yeah, and the second team unloads the carriage onto a bunch of horses and makes for the coast," another man said. "If Team One blows the coupling at exactly the right time..."

"You really think someone can blow a coupling at exactly the right moment to leave the carriage in the right place?" The objection came from the only woman at the table. "Gary, the Tullup reaches speeds of over three hundred kilometres per hour between some stations. Have you ever heard of a thing called 'momentum'?"

Sounds like the kind of plan that comes with the words "what could possibly go wrong?" attached. Fine times ahead, characters...

*evil laugh*

NaNoWriMo Day 17: 50k!!!

I am a surprised and somewhat confused writer at the moment. I have no idea what to say about anything and after writing 5k today to hit the goal I'm not sure the 'random word vomit' function is working well enough to pull out a blog post.

Anyway, 50k. According to the first draft I'm a whisker under halfway through the story. According to my vague intention of doing a lot more expansion in the second and third sections of the story, I'm probably somewhere around a quarter of the way through. According to my goal of making this draft 150k, I've just hit 1/3. Well... technically I did that when I hit 50k on the draft the day before yesterday. I started NaNo with 8k already written. I know, bad me - continuing a WIP instead of starting from scratch.

Now to attempt some random word vomit:

NaNoWriMo day 14: this may actually count as an epiphany

 The image to the left is my current desktop. It's either screen grabs or a descent into fangirling and the search for perfect death metal hair. WARNING: if I remember to get my favourite wallpaper off my other computer, I'll be able to combine the two things.

So anyway, I realised something a bit frightening today. If I wasn't doing NaNoWriMo, I probably would have stopped writing this story by now. I would have succumbed to the voice that tells me that some other story would be easier or that I need to spend more time planning before diving into a second draft. With no deadline, I wouldn't have been able to find the motivation to keep going in the face of all the problems I know I haven't fixed.

A message from the universe

Also known as "Sucker! Nobody reads your blog!"

Yeah, so anyway...

At this point I'm starting to think it's a good time to crawl back under my rock. Nobody making me feel like my story sucks, no Wordpress making ancient and mystical signs in my direction, no issues with software or planning methodologies and no pressure to do anything other than maintain the worms and beetles at an an acceptable volume.

Edit 2014/08/24: For the record, this post was about the fact that the last four bars on the stats graph look like a fist with middle finger raised. Nothing to do with actual numbers.

My story sucks and I have no idea what to do about it

Oh, look - a day that requires a blog post and a depressed writer. Seems like a match made in heaven, doesn't it? I guess that means I'm gearing up for a gloomy ramble about how much my story sucks.

NaNoWriMo update: day 11

So, blogging every day is going well. I've been writing and I have a healthy-looking NaNoWriMo wordcount, but keeping up with the social media isn't going so well. Regular tweeting fell by the wayside, I have to make myself go on the NaNo forum and my aim of having different writing challenge every day on Arrow of Eloquence sort of stopped along with the regular blogging. I've been doing stuff, though. Like I said, my wordcount is looking pretty good. I've also installed a whole new operating system on my laptop and I'm settling in with a bunch of new writing tools.

The Frozen Tear

I have no idea what to post today. Actually, yes I do: the 'probably won't be changed much until after I've finished the draft' version of the synopsis for The Frozen Tear, my NaNoWriMo novel.

The NaNoWriMo Lunatic

Today is poetry day in Siana-land. I wrote this some time in 2011 and this seems like a good time to share it. Welcome to 'The NaNoWriMo Lunatic':

She seemed no different from the rest
Just a boring normal girl
Her mother always did her best
And she was daddy's pride and joy

Writing through the fear

The Frozen Tear is now sitting on 16666 words, 8163 of which are countable for NaNoWriMo. I freak out every time I even think about writing more, but I'm doing it anyway. I'm wondering if this is what the whole story is going to be like and the answer is probably 'yes'. I've felt the same way about all the other things I've written so far this year.

The delights of the second draft

Right now I'm 13,624 words into the second draft of The Frozen Tear, originally my NaNo 2010 novel and now once again a NaNo project. It was my first ever completed draft and I was so proud of it that I actually gave it to my parents to read. They said it needed work... as in the kind of 'work' that would make it about three or four times its original length. I said "yeah, okay, so I'll turn it into a trilogy". Then I sat on it for two years and wrote a whole lot of other stuff.

NaNoWriMo Day 1: midnight madness

There's something special about sitting in front of the computer at 11:59 pm on the last day of October, waiting for that final minute to be over so that NaNoWriMo can begin. Even though I'm a NaNoRebel this year, I still went for the midnight start and ended up writing 2,317 words before going to bed.