Playing Catch Up with NaNoWriMo 2013!

Wow, do I ever have a lot of catching up to do here.  What with all the stuff I've had to do revolving around healthcare this year, I have had to cut back lots of other activities, and one of those I ended up dropping was blogging.  I had originally intended to do National Novel Writers Month again this year, but I think I will do my own version, so I can reward myself for feeling better while catching up on writing/crafting/posting to eliminate the mathematical guilt I feel when I see how far behind my (super-idealistic) goal I am with two months to go in the year.  So I will write and post up a storm this month, and if I have any words left over, I know which novel I want to do some more drafting on . . .  (The Napkin Epic has been much on my mind this autumn.)  Starting tomorrow, we will commence with the catch-up on these four blogs.  Be ready for it!

5 more things I learned from NaNoWriMo 2012 (2)

1. Once-in-a-lifetime Studio Ghibli film on the big screen marathons make daily quotas difficult.
2. But not impossible over the course of a month so long as you don't get too far behind or let yourself give up after getting somewhat far behind.
3. Thanksgiving break can be a good time to catch up.
4. I have a lot more work to do if this raw material is even going to possibly reassemble itself into something novel-like for next November's draft.
5. There are enough things to write about that I should never run out of ideas for things to draft.

5 things I learned from NaNoWriMo 2012 (1)

1. If I wanted to know whether I'm capable of more sheer output (quality not considered) than I currently produce, the answer is YES.
2. Pre-planning or at least pre-drafting and free-writing are helpful.
3. They make the vomiting of draft material onto the page that much easier.
4. Maybe I should do my reading research in October.
5. Because for some reason it was hard to read as much as I wanted and write as much as I'd committed to on the same days in November.

NaNoWriMo Update 1

I probably shouldn't say this so early, but hitting the quota for National Novel Writing Month today was easy.  It took less than an hour and a half.  That'll be tough to carve out on my busiest days, for sure, but the fact that this is about output and not quality is really very freeing.  (To see the current total, look to your right where the tracker is to keep me honest.)

To some extent, these blogs (one post a day spread among 4 different blogs) are also an experiment in output, but they were more about any daily output, not 1667 words of it.  And it's only really this year that I've started to be more consistent with the daily part.  (I admit I do cheat sometimes since Blogger fixed the scheduling feature, so I can designate a time I want it to say it was posted, so it doesn't look like I did three posts on the same day after getting behind, but I think I've kept it in the same month, and you will notice a regularity there.)  Maybe I needed 3 years of fiddling with that to get into enough of a habit to be able to make NaNoWriMo work for me.

Extensive planning is allowed, and maybe such activities would have helped me focus better and have some themes and chapter divisions already picked out that I could write towards, but my decision to participate was somewhat last minute, and I didn't want to try to cram all that thinking into a short time and set myself up for disappointment.  I sensibly decided to settle for some free-writing to get some topics and ideas down.  On October 31st, I did enough brainstorming to make this some sort of bloated epic.  (I'll settle for hitting the goal of 50,000 related words.)  Now I don't even have to strain to come up with the topic for the day's "chapter."

The result will be a lot of haphazard info dumped onto pages without any thought for novel structure and final form.  According to the rules, that's okay.  Yay rules! 

In conclusion, it looks like my results will be about what I predicted, the kind of kitchen sink draft my essay professor and my fiction professor suggested as an exercise in completing something all in a set time and worrying about editing it later once I saw what kind of story and themes naturally shaped themselves in the drafted material.  I may even hold off trying to dump it all into the computer until the end (or until my hand gives out) to prevent the urge to edit/tinker.  This might mean I won't be able to upload the scrambled novel and get the official completion badge, but I can live with that, if need be.  If I succeed, I'll know, and you'll know, and that's probably enough for a first try.

Just testing whether the looming specter of personal humiliation is a reliable muse

Some advice I liked from the NaNoWriMo website.

2) Do not edit as you go. Editing is for December and beyond. Think of November as an experiment in pure output. Even if it’s hard at first, leave ugly prose and poorly written passages on the page to be cleaned up later. Your inner editor will be very grumpy about this, but your inner editor is a nitpicky jerk who foolishly believes that it is possible to write a brilliant first draft if you write it slowly enough. It isn’t. Every book you’ve ever loved started out as a beautifully flawed first draft. In November, embrace imperfection and see where it takes you.

Except for Joseph Conrad's novels.  He only ever wrote one draft.  Maybe this is why so many of his works are so perfectly depressing.

3) Tell everyone you know that you’re writing a novel in November. This will pay big dividends in Week Two, when the only thing keeping you from quitting is the fear of looking pathetic in front of all the people who’ve had to hear about your novel for the past month. Seriously. Email them now about your awesome new book. The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse.

Hey, everyone, I'm writing a "novel" as defined by NaNoWriMo this November.  Don't write to ask how it's going because I probably won't answer your email, and then I will feel guilty about this.  : )  I'll post updates here.  See you then.