Last year, inspired by Cafe Aphra‘s Alternate NaNoWriMo, I set up a NaNoWriMo profile, set a goal of finishing my novel that was already in progress (The Trickster Entanglement), and set a word count goal of at least 1,000 words a day. This was a deviation from the official NaNoWriMo rules at the time:

• Write one 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.
• Start from scratch.
• Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction.
• Be the sole author of your novel.
• Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.

Once I had my profile set, I discovered the NaNo Rebels forum on the NaNoWriMo site, which was an officially sanctioned way of doing more-or-less what I planned to do.

This year, NaNoWriMo has officially loosened the rules a bit, striking the “Start from scratch” rule and replacing it with, “Don’t count anything you wrote before November 1 in your word count.”

Even though all of my previous participations in NaNoWriMo have been at deviance with the rules, I’m actually a little disappointed in that rule change. Because I’ve always thought that the original goal of trying to write a novel in a month was a great exercise. The only reason I hadn’t done it before was because before the first NaNoWriMo ever, I’d already been in situations at work where I wrote more than 50,000 word in less than a month. I didn’t feel I needed to learn that lesson, but rather needed to get better at finishing things I’d already started.

That’s why when I participated before last year, I would set myself a goal I usually called GeneStoFinMo (Gene’s Story Finishing Month), where I’d try to finish a bunch of stalled short stories. I had varying degrees of success.

Last year was completely different. I attribute part of it to having only one story I was focused on. Another part of the difference was I did post word counts on the site regularly. And I had at least a couple of writing buddies I was competing against. Or we were egging each other on. Or something.

In any case, wrote 58,000 words, very nearly finishing the novel last November. I used both Camps NaNoWriMo this year to tackle revising and finishing that novel and a related project. I contemplated the goal of using this November to complete implementing the rest of the editorial comments I’d received on a previous project, but I’d been revising and editing and so forth all year. I felt like I needed to do something different.

So this year my goal is to write at least the first half of the next novel in my fantasy series. I say half, because my guess is the final product will be about 90,000 words. I am setting the word count goal of 1667 words a day. So, yes, I want to hit at least 50,000 by the end of the month. I have written several scenes that might be in the book. But I’m not sure. So the plan is to start from a totally blank file at midnight on October 31, and see where the words take me.

If, by chance, you are participating in NaNoWriMo this year and would like to be writing buddies, my NaNoWriMo name is Fontfolly. Please add me, say hello, and I’ll add you back.

Let’s get writing!

I had so much fun (and got a lot of work done) with April’s Camp NaNoWriMo, that I have signed up again for July. And this time I have a bunch of friends joining me. Some had to be bullied convinced to join the fun, but I’m hoping they enjoy it as much as I did last time.

My project this time is looping back to my previous novel. I’ve received editorial comments on the completed manuscript from several editors and readers. Now I need to edit, fix, and otherwise finish it so that it is ready to publish.

While resisting urges to work on the just finished first draft of the second book, or a little side project, or the next book, or…

My friend, Mark, who’s been doing NaNoWriMo longer than I, set up a “cabin” (which is mostly just a private message forum) and invited a passel of our friends to join in. Everybody has different kinds of projects planned. I look forward to teasing and encouraging and assisting each other through this month of creativity!

I’m scheduling this post to publish midday on the first, which means some of you will be reading this while I’m under sedation having a not terribly pleasant medical procedure. Or maybe by now I’m home recovering, saying silly things to the crazy friend (and cabin mate) who has kindly volunteer to drive me back while I’m under the effects of the drugs. Or driving my poor husband crazy. Or maybe I’m just going to sleep it off.

So I’m not sure how much progress I’ll make in the opening 24 hours of Camp NaNoWriMo. But it doesn’t matter. Full speed ahead!

So, this year, inspired by the fabulous people at Cafe Aphra, I decided to do an Alternate NaNoWriMo.

Continue reading NaNoWriMo Rebel Winner →

We’re a bit past halfway through National Novel Writing Month and my word count is 28,550. Since I’m participating in Cafe Aphra’s Alternate NaNoWriMo (or just being a NaNo Rebel, depending on how you look at it), I did not start with a blank page and begin writing a new novel at 12:01 am on November 1. Instead, my goal is to finish my novel, The Trickster Entanglement (which is a sequel to my novel The Trickster Apocalypse) by the end of the month.

Because of my past experiences of trying to tie a personal story-finishing goal into the creative energy of the NaNoWriMo experience, I also set myself a goal of writing t least 1000 words a day, updating my word count regularly on the NaNoWriMo website (where I am Fontfolly—if you’re participating in and have an account, feel free to add me as a Writing Buddy). I have also tried to be racing with a few of my friends as an additional incentive.

This weekend was not very productive. I knew it would be a challenge, because we were hosting the monthly Writers’ Night at our house and I was scheduled to gamemaster a SteamPunk game on Sunday. Hosting Writers’ Night meant cleaning the house and cooking for a bunch of people, in addition to the time of the actual event. Running the game meant doing some research and cooking food to bring to the potluck in addition to the time of the actual event.

Plus, as if that wasn’t enough, on Friday afternoon, while I was working from home, and specifically when I was getting ready to run out for a doctor’s appointment, the toilet decided to overflow! That created an unexpected amount of work that day, as you can imagine.

I had about 75,000 words of the novel written before I started. Those words were arranged into 14 and a couple half-chapters, the chapters consisting generally of 3 to 5 scenes each. One of the reasons for the two half-chapters has been that for some months I’ve been mucking about trying to re-organize what was there. The reasons for the re-org were two-fold. About half the attendees of the monthly writer’s meeting had raised the issue a few times that the story either had two many characters for people to keep track of, or too many sub-plots to follow. The other half of the group seemed to think that the characters and subplots were okay (and they could see how subplots were converging), but admitted it was difficult for them to say how it held together with so much going on, and gaps of a month in-between reading what came next.

Thus, I’d been spinning my wheels engaged in a lot of re-considering and re-arranging as I tried to figure out which parts were truly vital to the main plot.

Since starting NaNoWriMo, I’ve written 37 complete new scenes. I have advanced several of the subplots fairly well. I’m more or less organizing the scenes into chapters, though at the moment some of those chapters are a lot longer than I had previously been letting them go. At the moment I have 21 chapters, I think (it’s a little weird because I have three chapter 13s and three chapter 17s for reasons that are a bit long to explain at this juncture; but cleaning all of that up is something to do after NaNoWriMo, right?).

As a consequence of taking the NaNoWriMo philosophy to heart—keep writing, just keep writing, don’t stop to edit and revise—one thing that has been different about the new chapters is that I’m sticking with one set of characters for several scenes in a row. Based on comments at the Writers’ meeting this last weekend, I think one of the main problems in the earlier chapters was that I was grouping scenes into chapters such that the reader was constantly jumping from one set of characters to another. There are some points in the plot where that really is necessary, but I think with the complicated plot I have (the word “entanglement” is in the title for more than one reason!), that allowing the reader to focus on few characters at a time will work out better in the end.

So, while this last weekend wasn’t productive, I have made a lot of good progress. Even with a workday that had a doctor appointment and a plumbing accident, I still managed to write 1574 words on Friday. Saturday was quite a bit less at about 512, and Sunday with 849. I suspect I’ll be able to go back to regularly beating my 1000 word minimum. I also feel quite strongly that I am going to finish the first draft by the end of November.

Wish me luck!

Yesterday was day six of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). On Wednesday I only wrote 1258 words of new content on my novel in progress. I lost a bit more time than usual researching some stuff for the book, as well as researching something because of a comment from a friend about another blog post. My total word count at the end of day six is 9789.

This isn’t my first year to do something NaNoWriMo-related, but it is the first year that I’ve actually set up an account at the site, and the first year that the alternative I’ve crafted for myself is so close to the spirit of NaNoWriMo.

• I’m writing every day on one novel.
• I have a daily word count target I’m aiming for.
• I have the long-term goal of finishing the novel at the end of the month.

The only thing I’m doing that breaks the “rules” is that I didn’t start a new book from scratch on November 1.

Besides having several friends participating with whom I am checking periodically, this year I have recruited my mom to give it a try. She aspired to be a writer before I was born, and had a particularly traumatic experience when her new mother-in-law found mom’s unfinished first person romance novel and accused mom of having an affair. My paternal grandmother told anyone and everyone she had proof mom was having an affair, and she even coerced my dad into meeting with a divorce lawyer, among other things.

I only learned about that particular incident recently. Growing up, I knew my mom loved books, and she was quite supportive of my early interest in both reading and writing.

Anyway, for some years now I’ve been trying to encourage her to write, with only moderate success. Until I told her about NaNoWriMo. “Can anyone do it?” As soon as she said that, I knew she was hooked.

The first two days she did everything long hand. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve showed her how to use the word processor program on her Mac. For some reason it has just never sunk in that you can do something other than write a short note in those things.

So I walked her through it. I thought, given how she’s always talking about how much she likes having a laptop and how portable it is, that she’d want to write on it. Turns out that what seems to work best for her is typing on her iPhone. Yep, she now has not one but two Word Processors on her iPhone. I showed her how to set up the Dropbox synching with that, so she can work on the stories easily on either her computer or her iPhone.

And she’s writing away and so far having a ball.

The only pep talk I’ve had to give her was when she found herself worrying about some scenes she thought that maybe she should go back and edit. But she already knows that she has a tendency to get caught in unending revision loops on a single scene, so she knew it was a bad idea. I suggested that when the voice in her head started worrying about mistakes that needed fixing, that she just tell the voice that December is for revising.

She said it’s working.

Word count at the end of the third day: 5848. Average per day is not high enough to hit 50,000 by the end of the month, but my word count per day is ramping up. And so far I’ve exceeded my minimal goal each day.

Since I’m doing The Alternate NaNoWriMo this month, my blog posts are either going to be shorter and less meaty, or simply less frequent.

I will try to write about something else at least occasionally, since I know that simply reporting my word count and occasionally commenting on what I’m working on is probably not going to be that interesting.

So far (and I realize it’s only been three days), I’ve been finding it works better than my previous attempts to do an alternative version of the exercise. Previously I didn’t set a daily word minimum, so while I did try to keep track of how many words I wrote, I wasn’t focused on that. It was also a little difficult since I had given myself an open-ended assignment to finish “some stories that have been stalled.” Since I was jumping back and forth between tales, figuring out the word count was a little tricky (not impossible, just a multistep tedious process).

It also gave me a great way to procrastinate by doing something I could rationalize as “productive.” If I wasn’t making progress on one story, I could just open one of the other files, and waste time by re-reading what was there in order to orient myself. Some nights I opened and re-read a half dozen or more unfinished tales and got no writing done at all.

Limiting myself to this book in progress, and not any of the many short stories, et al, hanging out there (and not allowing myself to count anything I write in them toward my total) seems, so far, to be doing a good job of keeping me focused.

Knock wood.