I mustn’t read things when I’m meant to be working.
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I will take a look tonight
I feel this so much! I signed up for my first NaNo this year, and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed about the word count, but after this I feel like it is definitely an attainable goal. This really was a great motivational exercise for us that are new to this kind of thing. I appreciate being a part of it so much, especially because of that.
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As an ardent avoider of NaNo, I would offer a few NiaD based suggestions that could be applied to make NaNo a more NiaD like successful endeavor.
- Reach out to Piggy and ask how he plans NiaD briefs. It isn’t terrible but it isn’t trivial.
- Start planning 2 months ago. Or dedicate all open time to getting your stuff converted to piggy plan.
- Don’t focus on the little details in the chapter brief. Make them as abstract as NiaD briefs.
- Set a 4 hour “write or die” block that is nothing but writing your 2k words and editing it AS A SHORT STORY.
- On Nov 1, start your block with chapter one. You know the whole plan but think only about your brief. NaiD that b!tch right to the end of your time limit.
- Acknowledge that you don’t have a great chapter. That’s ok. Do not change it. Go through and find the threads that need to be continued and UPDATE FUTURE BRIEFS. Find things that need to be killed off and UPDATE FUTURE BRIEFS. If you added a character UPDATE FUTURE BRIEFS.
- Now you can go fix chapter 1 but keep to your guns for the edits you made to briefs. Get it to a state of “better” and let it be.
- Repeat for daily for chapters 2-X.
- After X days you have an “ok” novel. Put on your editor hat and fix it.
While I may avoid NaNo I did this for my own gratification. I think what I made was a travesty that literally caused a mac to end it’s own existence. But it was a huge improvement over all my half-finished unreadable nonsense. A few very smart people have made a statement in the early days of the forum, but the one that stuck in my mind and I will accuse of influencing me greatly was the following by Sean Coffee:
All your intentions are meaningless. There is only one way two be an author. Ass in chair.
I’m sure that’s more of a paraphrase than a quote and he wasn’t the first one to say it. He’s just the one that stabbed me in the eye with it.
So make your stack of NiaD briefs, get your ass in the chair, go win NaNo.
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Someone early in my NaNoWriMo period gave me great advice that really helped me meet my computer-calculated word goals: give your main character a stutter.
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I can do that! Suddenly not worried. 
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Hi kids!
This sounds like a fun concept. A friend of mine and I did something like this a long time ago, trying to write alternate chapters. We made it six chapters before we gave up because we were arguing too much about the characters and also had no friggin’ clue how to outline or plan a story. It was basically “Oh look, a fantacy setting. Maybe… um. Something magic?” Hehe.
How would I go about getting placed on the advance notice for the next time this enterprise gets going? It sounds like a lot of fun.
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It’s a fair bet that we will successfully coddle or otherwise twist the hooves of @pigfender in the usual way (ftnt) so that something like this happens again at something like around this time (mid Oct) next year. So, one way would be to mark your calendar for sometime before that and check back here to the NIAD subforum for what news.
–gr
ftnt: Thanks to this year’s NIAD, most of us are now highly-trained for special ops, so no problem.
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Oh FFS, why did I spell it “fantacy”? *Headdesk
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I just assumed it was a new sub-genre I’d not heard of, and as such I’m stealing it. 
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Fill in the form at novelinaday.com/contact and we’ll add you to the mailing list.
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Could this be a genre hint from @pigfender as to the next NIAD’s genre?
‘Fantacy’.
Experts disagree as to the exact nature of this genre newcomer, with the most popular hypothesis being that it is some kind of racy fantasy.
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I should have spelled it “Phantasie” like the 1980’s video game series. I only played “Phantasie III: The Wrath of Nikodemus,” though.
Maybe that explains the spelling.
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Thanks. Done.
And now we wait…
I’ve done NaNo since 2006. Its goal of 1667 words/day is doable. But it does take commitment. It’s more of a marathon while NiaD is more like a sprint.
The goal of getting to The End in NaNo has been the best thing for my writing. I often would stop writing when the story got boring. Aka the midpoint. LOL After I’d read through the old NaNo site and found a bunch of info through them, I found out, that’s quite common to give up there.
NaNo says, keep writing it, ignore the boredom, and get to The End.
2006 was the first time I ever actually finished a story. It was short of the 50k goal so I learned word padding. 
Big thing to remember is NaNo was created to help you sit down and write. Even if you can only manage 20 min or 500 words per day, you’re creating a habit and showing yourself you can write!
In other words, even if you don’t “win”, as long as you’re doing something, you don’t lose either.
gives best End-of-Blather curtsy
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Bahahaha That’s awesome. I had characters use very long full names all the time. And no contractions.
Word padding is a skill.
Now I want it to be Epik Fantacy.
Or was it Fancy?
While I won’t ever do NaNo again since they chose to support domestic terrorism, I will agree that the midpoint is the hardest point to write, and a somewhat arbitrary “end point” enforced externally is extremely helpful.
My line of thinking, and I mean this literally, as in, “I have literally thought these words in my brain meats,” was “Now that I figured out the end, screw you other people!”
*- NOTE: Don’t say these words out loud to your sample readers. They get extraordinarily grumpy about the whole flaming thing.
Bear in mind that I had the original concept for The Circle in 1990 in bloody HIGH SCHOOL, and I am coming up on my thirty year reunion in 2022. I went about twenty years knowing the basic points of the story, started writing it in 2013, and wrote the end in 2015. In 2016 I did NaNo and wrote nearly all of the middle points. I now have about 20,000 words left, of which about 12,000 are written, and just need to be connected. I know that sounds like a whole third of the book or so, but the current manuscript is 92,500 words. 61,000 of which were written in 2016 during NaNo.
It’s not Stephen King’s It at 1144 pages, nor Simon Green’s Deathstalker series at 1.4 million words (at least half of which are the phrase “…a whole much greater than the sum of its parts”), but my magnum opus strongly identifies with the word “magnum” and can double duty as a doorstop if one needs to keep it from blowing open in a strong wind.
I need a bit more pressure from friends who have read it and demanded “Well, what happens next?!”
So, if anyone seeks to be my friend and/or read martial arts fiction where the protagonist is irrevocably broken from PTSD and survivor guilt, I can always use one more person to text or email me demanding to know where the hell chapter 29 is.
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The funniest part of this whole thing is that was literally my very first post in this forum. I have a feeling that I’m never going to live this down.
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