I am finding NaNo a good boost to my novel, Nascent Gory. (Doesn’t that title just grab you? It was a typo in a previous posting and now I sort of can’t shake it …)
I am averaging 1,000 words a day so far – some days 2,000, one brilliant day 2,060, one day 350, two days nothing. Zip. But I wake up every day determined to make some kind of progress. It doesn’t always happen. But nearly every day it does, which proves Chris Baty right: I needed a deadline. Thanks, Chris. And thanks, Keith, because this program is first-rate for writing and keeping things on track. Lovely, intuitive interface.
I continue to be fascinated by the word count at the bottom of my page and the progress bar – I plug in 1,667 and just watch it as I write. I didn’t discover this until I split the screen one time to have two chapters going at once, and there it was!
I took a two minute break from nanoing and saw the message from millie in my RSS feeds.
Last year was my first time trying to write anything longer than a research paper or a short story. I signed onto Nano at the last minute and cranked out 56,000 words in 26 days, and it even had a happy ending (I know: boooring!).
This year I couldn’t wait to do it again. And the New and Improved Scrivener makes it actually FUN AND INTERESTING to work out the pieces, move them around, and experiment. Awesome.
As we speak I’m at 43,272, so there should not be any problem hitting 50k. The problem, as always with great literature, is “who murdered all those hobos?” And if they never find out whodunnit - does it make the book better or worse?
Come to think of it, could ANYTHING make this book worse?
Oh yeah: ninjas. Ninjas would make it worse.
Back to writing!
(Last year’s epic was titled TOURNAMENT OF FEAR; this year’s has the working title THE ART RATINGS, but I might try a twist on THE GLASS BEAD GAME).
I finished my 50k yesterday - but haven’t finished the book yet. This is quite a relief because my reason for doing NaNoWriMo was to see if I could switch to fiction, write a full-length piece of work, and develop a habit of writing a modest minimum word count every day. 50k might be good practice for a short-term target, but I’m not sure what possible use it might be as a full-length piece of work! (Not being F Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway etc., I don’t think I have the commercial clout for a publisher to be interested in any novella I might write.)
So I am now aiming to finish my longer-than-50k first draft by 30th November so that I have something to work on in December/January. Not sure it’s feasible, but I’m afraid I really do need an external deadline to get myself in gear. Sometimes I think I must be very lazy, but then I look at all my embryonic projects and realise that I am just easily distracted
I’m afraid I have turned into some sort of Scrivener fanboy (or girl), because I have developed a habit of saying things like “I have no idea how I managed to write anything before I had Scrivener”, and I keep making my poor husband look at the binder of whatever project I have open (only the non-fiction ones - nobody is allowed to see my fiction!) to demonstrate Scrivener’s amazing ability to keep everything together, out of the way and yet visible, all at the same time. Thanks, Keith - not a day goes by without my being glad you developed this software (which is quite strange as I’ve been using it for eight months, so you would think the thrill would have worn off by now)
No, the submission process is literally just a script that counts your words and gives you your certificate if your MS is over 50,000. It probably doesn’t even save the text anywhere.
You could fill it up with gibberish if you wanted. But why you would bother, I can’t imagine. What would be the point? Nobody even knows who you are. (I don’t even have the same username there that I have here.) It’s not a competition. It’s not a race. And I don’t think it’s meant to be taken terribly seriously.
I see it as a tool to help people get over whatever it is that stops them writing - which in my case is a compulsive urge to self-edit, which kicks in when I hit 7500 words, followed by crashing disbelief in my ability to pull off a full-length novel of any literary value. And it’s a bit of fun, in a flash-crowd everybody-in-the-same-boat sort of way.
Amber is the only person on board Scivener, whos capable of imbuing lorum ipsum, with : pertinence ; topicality; and all those prerequisites, demanded of a: Grab you by the Carotid artery` pot poiling page turner, whilst firing off salvos of coruscative excoriating inuendoes at anyone who crosses her.
vic
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I like the lorem ipsum idea. It’s got considerably more plot and better character development than my novel-in-the-making!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vivamus neque eros, venenatis at, placerat sit amet, facilisis a, ligula.
“Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit…” Unless ofcouse, shes a lover of Laudanum and Victorian debauched subliminality.
If I’d started with a synopsis, I suspect I’d still be at the 7500-word stage! Release your inhibitions, Vic! (Or was that a rash thing to say…)
As an aside, I am sitting on the sofa, looking out the window at the blue sky, and admiring the contrast between that and the yellow leaves on a particular tree - and I have just noticed that the moon is rising so fast I can actually see it move. Weird, eh?
I think your keyboards on the way out (a bit like mself). There`s some serious malfunctioning going on there (again, a bit …). Try hitting the escape key with the 6in heel of a black patent leather stiletto (open toe, obviously).
vic 8)
I know! I hadn’t noticed – or seen – that little round thingie at the bottom right until I’d been using Scrivener for ages. It’s your own little progress bar for that document. It motivates me.
Well I powered through the 50,000 word plateau last night, so on some level, I “win” at literature. Yay.
Of course, there are just a FEW loose ends to tie up. Same thing happened to me last year, when I did Nano for the first time: hit 50k after 3 weeks, then wrote another 6500 words to make it all go away with some kind of ending.
Another fun endeavor, made relatively…easy, thanks to Scrivener!
Just hit 46000. And I had to take a day off of work to wait for the refrigerator repair person to fix our ice maker. Hmmm, a whole day off of work, what ever shall I do?
I shouldn
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