Day: November 16, 2015

NaNoWriMo Day 16

/ Kristi / 4 Comments

The Words: 3426 written today.  I had a migraine most of the afternoon, and still had a decent headache going into my writing time. It actually eased up pretty quickly once I started writing, allowing me to go for a few hours and get the word count you see.

Since I put the final words into the novel I started the month with, I had to make a decision today. I’d always figured I’d just go onto another novel I had in mind if I did finish the other one early, but I started to realize some possible negative implications in doing that. If I don’t finish the second novel this month, it’ll most likely sit untouched and unfinished until next November. And I don’t like the idea of starting into an already-started novel at the beginning of NaNo (not just because it’s technically against the rules and would make me a rebel, but because I prefer to be able to start fresh). But I also don’t want to just call NaNo over for the year yet.

Other options I considered were using the rest of the month for revision, and tracking time spent, rather than words. But that’s just not as fun or exciting, and you can’t do word sprints or wars. I also thought about just writing random stuff from prompts or working on smaller stories, but I thought that would just be more difficult to keep going through the month.

So I’ve decided to start on a second novel. I have 15 days to get as far into it as I can. My plan for right now is to aim for a daily word count of 3333 words (twice the normal daily amount), in an attempt to get 50k words of it done before November ends. But since it’s an extra goal, and I’ve already had some rough times this month, I won’t be holding myself too strictly to that. It’s just something to aim for.

The Story: When I get a chance, I’ll try to come up with a proper synopsis for this story, so I can share it here and on the NaNo site. And a title, even if just a working title, because I have no ideas for one yet. For now, I’ll just dive into what’s going on.

The main character, Jonathan, and his War Games team have recently been evicted from the building in which they’ve been living for a while. They have 24 hours to vacate, and we peek in on some of the packing that’s happening. We meet some of the other members of the team, as well as the team’s leader, who is heavily stressing out over the events that led to their eviction.

Jonathan is the team’s official blacksmith (yes, more smiths), who makes bladed weapons for his teammates. He has a small set-up in the building, so he has a lot of equipment to move out. First, though, he has to contact his wife, who was away on a mission when everything happened. She’s upset that she’s unable to be there to help him pack their things.

Total word count: 60,981

day 16

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2015 – November 16th

Writing Highs

/ Kristi / 5 Comments

I did something late Friday night that I want to share. The first novel draft I ever finished, “Pithea,” which I mostly wrote during NaNo 2013 has been undergoing revision for almost 2 years now. After I’d had some time alone with it, I started into a process with 2 of my sisters, wherein we’d meet every Tuesday evening on Skype and work through their notes on my revised draft. It’s more than just the writing we’ve been working on; the story is set in a fantasy-type world, and they’ve helped me work out the elements of it. As time has gone on, the story has gotten better, characters have gotten stronger, and the mechanics of the world I’ve built are clearer.

It’s been just over a year since we started these weekly editing sessions, and most of my writing time has been spent reading ahead of them and making more of my own revisions. We’re basically working from a 3rd draft, which I’ve been creating as we go. Hopefully this makes some sort of sense.

Anyway, Friday night, after I’d done my NaNo writing for the day, I sat down to get more revision done, more of “draft 3” ready so that we can work on it this coming Tuesday. And I got through the last 8 pages of the draft, which means that on Tuesday, we’ll probably finish the last pages of the draft too. Which means this revision, the most intensive one it should need, will be done!

Now there are still some things that need worked on. During our revision sessions, we passed over bigger issues that we knew would just slow us down. There were big, world-related questions that came up that we decided weren’t important to solve just yet. We will hopefully have an in-person, all-day meeting in the next month or so to hammer all of these things out. But after that, I’ll be one huge step closer to be ready to publish this thing. It’s actually scary to be so close and still have no idea what I’m doing. But it’s still better than doing nothing.

And in the time since then, other exciting things have happened. I finished the first draft of this year’s NaNoNovel, only halfway through the month. I was in the local newspaper (front page) with other area Wrimos, and the article even included a link to my blog! (See more about that here.) My region’s ML today shared the crocheted octopus she made for me, as a reward for being one of the first in our region to donate and contact her about it. And my NaNo winner’s shirt is on its way!

This weekend was definitely a high for writer-me.