The Words: 3347 words total for the day, and I passed the halfway point!
This is clearly going to be looked back on as the year I did NaNo with my 10-year-old daughter, because all of these words were done in sprints between 10 and 20 minutes, alongside my daughter. It certainly keeps me from slacking off!
The Story: There was some romance today, which slowed me down (it always does), and then the character I’ve been writing the most about got a chance to confront her dad. Things got pretty heated right at the end of my writing today.
I also decided today that I am going to need to seriously pare down this storyline if the 4-part story is going to work. But I think one way I can do that is by telling the story from a different POV. Because of how this storyline came about, I’m more connected to the main woman whose perspective I’ve been mostly telling the story from, but really, the main guy is supposed to be the MC of this storyline. And his POV, I think, will cut down on explanation anyway (hard to explain, but I think it will work that way). So as much as I’m itching to start over and see how it goes, I’ve already spent more words on this storyline than I thought, and just want to get through it. Another big task for the next draft!
Total word count: 26,997
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 10, 2010!
I wrote all of this doing sprints with my daughter today. She’s really excited about how her story is going and has gotten a little faster with her writing during sprints as we’ve gone.
Also, I decided to up my personal daily goal, since the first of 4 storylines is taking a lot more words than I’d allotted. I don’t anticipate the other 3 being this involved, but this one could cause me to run out of month before I finish the entire draft, so I’ll shoot for more like 3000 words per day for now.
The Story: Things got really fun today as one of the main characters from storyline #1 got to meet one of the most ridiculous and fun characters to write from my book series. I may be writing him a bit over the top right now, but I can’t help it. I can always fix it in editing.
Total word count: 23,650
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 9, 2010!
Half of this was written alongside my 10-year-old daughter, doing word sprints. She really spurs me on! The other half was written in a couple of solo sprints earlier in the day.
The Story: Today’s writing was mostly a long conversation between this storyline’s two major characters, in an attempt to avoid cliched miscommunications. A friendship deepened as they were able to celebrate a big event in one of their lives. Then, just as I was about to go on to bring in the one Main Event all of the storylines revolve around, I realized I needed to stop to explain how one of the characters left things with her dad. It will probably be ordered a little differently when I revise this draft, because it’s a bit awkward right now, on the cusp of a big intrigue, but then wait, let’s get domestic first.
Total word count: 20,262
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 8, 2010!
The Words: 2635 words total for the day. I’m now caught back up to where I should be with my personal goal of 2500 words per day.
All of my words today were written alongside my 10-year-old daughter, dong word sprints. We did a few with the @NaNoWordSprints feed on Twitter, and a few of our own when the timing didn’t work out with the feed. We prefer 10-minute sprints, because her hands start to hurt if we go much longer than that without a break.
The Story: The plot took a big step forward today as the main character in this storyline made a huge decision and executed it. I’d just gotten to the beginning of the fallout from that decision, and will continue with that tomorrow.
Total word count: 17,596
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 7, 2010!
The Words: 3531 words total for the day. Because of how I’ve been pushing to get words in last-minute recently, I made sure to do some writing this afternoon, getting about 800 words.
My 10-year-old daughter has been saying she wants to write when I write, but hadn’t up to today. She started a story about a birthday party last year, got about a page done, and stopped. Today, she insisted that she wanted to do some sprints with me. So after supper, we both joined in on a couple of sprints with the @NaNoWordSprints feed on Twitter. Then right before she went to bed, we did a few more sprints.
She loves doing them and wants to keep writing with me this month. She even said that she’s glad she realized how much she loves it now, when there’s still so much time left. And I read her story so far. It’s got some really funny moments in it!
The Story: I feel like I kind of rambled a bit as I tried to get the story back on track after the characters had some conversations that can’t be in the story yesterday. Then suddenly, I had an idea about how to insert some drama, which will make the person who’s basically been the MC so far seem a lot more interesting. Though I may have to make some tweaks to her personality earlier in the story to make this work. This wasn’t in my outline, which is fine, but I am a little worried it will derail things in a way I do not want. We’ll see where it goes, though.
Total word count: 14,961
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 6, 2010! And in case you need some extra inspiration, check out the 2nd episode of the NaNoMusical!
The Words: 2810 words total for the day. I planned to write another 500 words over my personal daily goal of 2500 again today, to make up for day 3’s dismal word count, but I almost didn’t even write 2500.
I wrote about 500 in the early evening, before my normal evening rituals kicked in. That all went a little later than normal tonight, because my husband got home from work a little later. And before I knew it, once everything was settled down, it was 11 pm, and I still only had 500 words! So I sat down and just got going and managed to get 2200 words in a little under an hour.
The Story: The two major characters who have been conversing through letters finally met in person. Then they took the conversation in a way that I didn’t like, because it kinda throws a wrench in their motivations for the next scene or two. We’ll see how that all shakes out later. Because I was trying to write a lot of words in a small amount of time, most of what I wrote today was dialog without much action amongst it. But to be fair, I often leave that stuff to add in later, so it will be about like normal for a first draft.
Total word count: 11,430
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 5, 2010!
The Words: 3066 words total for the day. I had to make up a little for yesterday’s dismal word count, so I wrote 500 more than my personal daily goal of 2500. I did not stay up all night, but still spent a good amount of today recovering from the small amount of sleep. I didn’t start writing until around 7:30, and then did a chunk here, a chunk there, finally finishing at around 11 pm.
The Story: There were a few letters written between a couple of major characters today, and now we’re going to an engagement party at a very large, fancy house. I may have bitten off more than I can chew with that, but I’ll be vague or completely skip descriptions for now, to avoid being slowed down during NaNo. I stopped writing right before the two major characters who have been writing letters back and forth are about to meet in person for the very first time.
Total word count: 8620
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 4, 2010!
The Words: 385 words total for the day, and I’m calling it at 11 pm. A combination of having a lot of things to get done at home today (mostly in the kitchen) and election-night distractions made it a difficult day to write.
I also have to go to bed, like, an hour ago, because I have to be up at 5 am to take some family members to the airport. So…I’m either going to go to bed right now, or I’m going to stay up until 5 am and get some extra writing in then. It remains to be seen which of these things happens.
But at least I did some and kept my streak. And I’m still on par for the normal NaNoWriMo word count, because I wrote extra the last 2 days.
The Story: I made sure to figure out where I was supposed to be in the storyline that I started on Monday, and wrote a little more of that today. I began the first letter of many that a major character will write to one of the main characters, though it didn’t go the way I’d planned.
Total word count: 5554
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 3, 2010!
The Words: 2591 words total for the day. I wrote a little after midnight last night, as I often do, to get a jump start on the next day’s writing. Because our neighbors are having the roof and siding replaced, we’re consistently being woken up earlier than I normally have to (no job outside the home, daughter is homeschooled, and I’m a night owl), so I wrote for 25 minutes, tapping away on my Neo while my husband slept, then read a little, and went to bed much earlier than normal.
The rest of the words came in sporadic bursts here and there throughout the day today, some on my Neo in my bedroom, some on my PC.
The Story: When I went upstairs to write for a while before bed, I failed to make sure I knew where I’d last left off. I had no clue where I was in the story and didn’t want to go back downstairs to look at the saved file on my computer. So I just started into another character’s storyline. I had specifically planned to stick to one storyline until it was done, or until I got bored, this year, since last year I went back and forth between two storylines just about every day. But alas, the only thing I could do with no idea of where I’d left off was to start at the beginning of a new storyline.
And then I went totally off outline, which I thought was fine at first, but realized that it was also quite out-of-character for this person. And I didn’t want that, so I flagged a chunk for deletion and went back to where I was still with the outline to keep writing.
Total word count: 5168
If you want to join me in my journey through the first year of NaNoToons (with a storyline), check out the NaNoToon from November 2, 2010!
The Words: 2577 words total for the day. I almost always start at midnight on Nov. 1 (in my 11 years of doing NaNo, I think I’ve only not done this twice), but I was in a car at midnight. Fortunately, I’d thought ahead to the possibility of not being home and had my Neo with me. Though I thought I’d be inside somewhere. It still worked….not well, because it was dark, and while I thought that would be fine, because of the no-editing rule, sometimes I couldn’t even remember what the last word I’d written was. Or when I inevitably did go back and erase something out of habit, I wouldn’t know if I’d gotten it all. That will be the most error-filled 700 words of the entire novel at the end of this. But I digress.
I wrote another 700 words when I got home, during a word sprint started on the Twitter feed of @NaNoWordSprints, and went to bed with the smallest midnight-sprint word count I’ve had in 8 years. But I was content with my number. I wrote another thousand words this afternoon to get to the number above.
I often set my daily goal higher than the normal minimum, because it’s important to me that I finish the draft of the novel before the motivation of the month disappears. Unfortunately, I never know how long the draft will actually be. I’m guessing around 75k this year, so my daily goal is 2500 words. And because I also don’t want to finish the draft too early in the month, I’m going to stop at 2500 as often as I can (sometimes I just get the urge to keep going, ya know?). It’s a delicate balance, trying to come to the end of the draft right at the end of the month, considering I don’t estimate my total draft lengths very well. But I’ll re-evaluate halfway through the month or so and raise or lower the word count if/as necessary.
My daily updates aren’t usually this lengthy; I just had a lot to explain today.
The Story: Even though I tried to think ahead about how to start this novel for the last few days, when the time came to begin, nothing really felt right. I stumbled through the opening scene and then dove into the beginning of one of the 4 storylines that will comprise this novel. And then between writing sessions, I thought about a way the opening scene might be better, so I wrote a note to myself for future editing. I don’t want to start re-writing scenes already, so I’ll worry about it later.
Total word count: 2577
For almost as long as I’ve been blogging about how NaNo is going all through the month of November, I’ve been sharing each day’s NaNoToon. Sadly, NaNoToons ended last year. Rather than give up that tradition, I’m going to start going back through them, starting with the first year there was a storyline through the month. So for today, if you want to join me, check out the NaNoToon from November 1, 2010!
And in honor of November 1st, because it is absolutely not NaNoWriMo without the NaNoMusical, here is episode 1!
A Journey of Words 