Neo

NaNoWriMo Day 7

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The Words: 2444 over the course of an hour and a half waiting for my kids to be done with their Wednesday night activities at church. I found an unused room at the church and typed away on my Neo.

Also, I passed the halfway point today!

The Story: Today’s writing jumped between different times when the king and Antios were discussing Antios’s travels, either before he’d left, or after he returned. In the end, the basic understanding we’re left with is that Antios has changed a lot, and not in a good way, and that the king regrets not keeping his friend from leaving in the first place.

Total word count: 26,667

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2018 – November 7th
And in case you need some extra inspiration, check out the 2nd episode of the NaNoMusical!

NaNoWriMo Day 6

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The Words: 2896 written today, on my Neo, at my first write-in for the year!

Yesterday, I realized that I was halfway through my outline, but not halfway through the 50,000 words, and not even close to halfway through the month. I prefer to write most of the month, even if I hit 50k early, but that’s harder to do if you run out of story.

I have already started to think of ideas for a 2nd story to start on if I do run out of story, but I’ve decided it will also help if I slow down a bit. I still want to write at least 1667 words every day, because that’s the core of NaNoWriMo, but I won’t be pushing to write any more than that.

The Story: On the ship on the way to the front lines, the king tells Lorrin about the enemy, who is a recent threat to their country. This is mostly shown in flashbacks.

The man leading the enemy army was once the king’s best friend. When they were in their early twenties, Antios itched to explore the world. They’re taught as children that most of the countries out there are off limits to them, for one reason or another. They have some allies, but there is a lot of fear and hatred out there. The king, at this time still a prince, tries to tell Antios that traveling so far is a bad idea, but he sets off on his adventure anyway.

Total word count: 24,233

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2018 – November 6th

NaNoWriMo Day 5

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The Words: 5686 written today, all on my Neo again. I wrote about 2000 words before I went to bed last night, and then got the rest with sprints throughout the day, both with my region’s Slack group and with NaNoWordSprints. (It helped that I had today off.)

The Story: A character almost got mauled to death by a bear today, completely unexpectedly (even by me). It was a pretty exciting start to the day’s writing. Lorrin has been recalled from the remote town, though, before the situation could be resolved. She is being sent to the front lines to fight under the most renowned general in the army.

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Total word count: 21,337

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2018 – November 5th

NaNoWriMo Day 4

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The Words: 4550 written today, all on my Neo. I didn’t write any last night after midnight, because I knew I’d have plenty of time throughout today to write. Just as I was about to start writing my first words today, I remembered that my home region recently started up a Slack group, so I joined that quickly, and was able to participate in some word wars with a few fellow Wrimos from my region. As helpful as writing with NaNoWordSprints is, I prefer more direct sprints and wars if possible. After getting the daily word goal, I took a break, and then caught a #1k30min on Twitter later, which netted me 1500 more words.

The Story: In today’s writing, we learn about the time that Lorrin spent in a southern region during a particularly brutal war with a very dangerous man. The war is in the background right now though, as some base drama leads to Lorrin being sent to a more remote location to help out with an unusual situation there. As she tries to figure out why local animals are behaving so strangely, she meets a man who does not want her or her fellow soldiers’ help.

Truth be told, they will never come to understand what is going on with the animals, and I am struggling to figure out how (and if) they can even stop the problem, or if it will be a continuous problem. This is the first way in which this story actually connects to my main story world.

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Total word count: 15,651

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2018 – November 4th

NaNoWriMo Day 26

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The Words: 350 written today, and 18 yesterday.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving for my side of the family, and we were gone until after midnight. We generally eat our big meal in the afternoon, and then play board games all night. The 18 words were literally a 5-minutes-to-midnight, just-get-some-words-in situation.

Then we ended up going and playing more board games today, because we didn’t quite get to enough of them yesterday. (Part of that was because my sister announced that she’s pregnant, so there was a lot of talking for a while before we got to board games.) So I had my Neo with me (today and yesterday) and wrote a bit more than yesterday.

The Story: I feel a bit like I’m dragging out the ending to this story, which is strange, because normally I feel like I’m rushing the ending. But I didn’t have anything planned for after the climax, and now I’ve just got Nathan and Clark explaining some things about what just happened with Vin to an unhappy Penny. And I’m not happy that I don’t have a good way to end the story. I will probably try to just get to an ending tomorrow, so I can say it’s finished. This story will need a lot of reworking someday though. It might be the first NaNoNovel I’ve drafted where I felt like it wouldn’t just need revision, in whatever capacity, but possibly a full rewrite someday. It just didn’t really have a solid story to it in the end.

Total word count: 69,871

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2017 – November 26th, and since I didn’t post yesterday, make sure to read yesterday’s too: 2017 – November 25th

Here is episode 5 of the NaNoMusical. This one has my favorite song from the entire musical! And things get real.

NaNoWriMo Day 15

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The Words: 1869 written today.

The climax to this story has been in my head for years, but always in this nebulous form where the heroes confront the bad man, defeat him, and then march triumphantly home. Now that it’s more than that–that the “bad guy” is more than a simple villain, I need it to be more than just, “they fight and the good guys prevail.”

But I’m struggling with how much of the fighting I need to show. I really dreaded picking back up where I left off yesterday. So I’m stalling. I wrote all 1869 words on my Neo, writing letters from Vin.

And now I can’t find the cable that connects the Neo to the computer. It’s a good thing the Neo has a word count feature built in.

The Story: I wrote 2 letters from Vin to the pastor today, and no other story. The second letter was pretty long. It turned into Vin explaining a bit more of his overall plan, after his entire purpose of coming to this place was a failure. But he’s confident that he will get another chance at it (and with good reason to be), so he still expects his overall plans to happen someday.

His overall plans are pretty much to be the next Jesus, by the way, but with his own agenda at the forefront.

Total word count: 59,377

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2017 – November 15th

NaNoWriMo Day 9

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The Words: 5402 written today.

I was done with work earlier than normal today (around 4pm), so I had a little extra time to write. However, because that doesn’t happen often, I also just wanted to do nothing productive. So I compromised with myself. I decided that if I wrote 1000 words, I could do whatever else I felt like until supper time.

Then during my normal evening writing time, I was really into the writing, so I got through quite a bit of it. When I validated my words and saw that I had passed 40k, and there’s still quite a bit of story left, I realized that I could pretty easily hit 100k this year.

The Story: First, that thousand words I wrote in the afternoon were on my Neo. For some reason, I have relegated the writing of Vin’s letters to the pastor to the Neo, and when I’m at the laptop using @NaNoWordSprints and Scrivener, I write about Penny, Rogan, and the others.

Though Vin’s letters are going to be spread throughout the novel, I have barely touched them. I think I’m still intimidated by Vin and his dark nature. I did do some on days 2 and 3, but I didn’t like how they came out. They were unnatural, like I was trying too hard (well, I was). The thing is, I had multiple conversations with Vin during NaNoPrep time. I’m not afraid to say it anymore. The plot for this story was difficult to pin down, especially when it came to Vin’s motivations. So every time I got stuck, I would go to my Neo and have a chat with Vin. I’ve never worked this way before, but it worked like a charm!

So in a way, I had to cancel out the first letters I wrote from his perspective (not delete them, because they still count, but just decide they weren’t going to be used) and tell him to talk to the pastor the same way he’s been talking to me, telling me what he’s been up to. So I wrote 3 letters from him today, and they came out so much better.

The evening writing continued with yesterday’s conversation between Penny and Cathy, where Cathy told Penny she had an idea to help them with the super-powerful man that they are trying to find. Cathy abruptly leaves, saying she can’t explain yet, but to not let Nathan confront Vin if he does track him down.

Then Penny is left alone, knowing that she couldn’t fight off Vin if he came after her. So she goes in search of allies. She goes to find Ari, and comes across Rogan instead. Then the two of them enlist the aid of someone who I had not planned to include in this story at all. He’s a secondary character in “Pithea,” and someone I do have other long-term plans for, but I’m pretty sure that at the time of this story, he’s just doing nothing (nothing crucial to another story arc, that is–just living life). And in fact, bringing him into this story will probably end up working nicely as the springboard into those long-term plans, so this has turned out perfectly.

I brought him in because I was searching my mind for characters that were already in my story that can use the Power in a way that would get Penny to safety if Vin attacked. This guy’s name popped into my mind, and thus popped into Penny’s mouth. I kinda love how organic writing the first draft can be! Yes, I have an outline (very vague, and stops soon in the story), but even as a planner, the plot and characters usually take on a mind of their own during the first draft.

Anyway, right at the end of my writing today, Nathan came back, with some very interesting news about what he discovered in that locked room, but he didn’t get a chance to share it, because I was done for the night.

Total word count: 40,363

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2017 – November 9th

NaNoWriMo Day 2

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The Words: 3830 written today. Last night after midnight, I wrote 772 words with my Neo right before bed. Then this evening, I sat down at my laptop and did a few word sprints with @NaNoWordSprints on Twitter. Forgetting for the moment that I had 772 words locked away on my Neo (I haven’t taken the time to get the cable out and transfer them yet), when I had reached 2800 words, I decided to round it off to 3000 on my own.

The Story: I didn’t want to try to remember where I’d left off in the storyline yesterday, so when I started writing on my Neo, I went over to the other storyline. This one is a sequence of letters from Vin, the title character, to a pastor that he knows to be a good man. Vin is going through a crisis of sorts, as he attempts to gain enough power to bend the world to his own morality. Because the pastor is the one who taught him about that morality, he’s pouring his uncertainties out into letters to the man, over the course of time. So far, he’s questioning whether or not lying to his great-grandmother to get her to give him some family heirlooms (so he can sell them) is stealing. And he’s musing about how difficult his father is to please, while the man himself is a pretty terrible guy.

The majority of the words were about Rogan. He’s in the house of his team’s War Games leader, a man that he really likes, so that helps his current situation a bit. That man, Ari, has been filling Rogan in on many huge events that have taken place lately. I may have gone into too much detail, especially considering that if this book is ever published, the reader would hopefully already know about a lot of these events. But boy is it good for some easy (and fun) word count.

Total word count: 9635

Don’t forget to check out today’s NaNoToons if you haven’t already: 2017 – November 2nd

My NaNo Survival Kit

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I figured with NaNoWriMo drawing ever closer, I’d share my own list of items that I’m collecting for my November survival kit. Some are ready to go, some I still need to get ready.

1. Laptop – The laptop itself is ready; in fact, I have a new one this year. It’s a work laptop, which comes home with me, and it’s very nice. The keyboard is a little frustrating though. I can’t say exactly why, but when I type my normal speed, I end up skipping letters way more often than I do on my desktop.

My writing space around my laptop is what I still need to work on. It’s piled high with papers and notebooks, related to both work and writing. I have a wooden filing cabinet near my desk that I plan to use to start organizing work papers, and go from there. That’s on my to-do list for the rest of October

2. Outline – I keep starting on this, and keep running into questions. I may need to stop worrying so much about a physical outline, and at least think through all of the broad points (it helps that I do have a timeline with key events listed out) to make sure there aren’t any more huge questions that need answered now, while I have more time. And this is just one plot thread I’ve been trying to outline. There will be another one, that I just realized yesterday might actually be a bigger thread than I thought, that I haven’t even started thinking about yet. So yeah, lots of work left to do on this, and I have how many days left?

3. Timeline
timeline Vin
I may not have an outline yet, but, as I mentioned, I do have a timeline. Because my 2017 NaNoNovel encompasses several other books, with some intertwining characters and plot points, I had to get this timeline set up a long time ago. Events have moved around a lot since then, even a lot just in the last couple of weeks, but I think it’s set now. And if I don’t end up with much of an outline, this will at least be something.

4. Notebook, pencil, & eraser

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And believe me, I has all the notebooks!

I still love the tactile feeling of writing by hand. I don’t do it much during NaNo, because it’s just…so…slow. But I always have at least one notebook with me when I leave the house during November, in case I have a chance to write, or even just a stray idea to jot down.

4-b. Thinkink Pen
fidget pen
The pen is metal and bendable, and comes with attachments that are either magnetic, or at least metal. It’s a fidget pen. I’ve noticed a tendency to take apart mechanical pencils when I’m in a meeting, or when I’m writing and have to stop to think. I’ve broken more than my share of pencils that way. This thing has been great!

5. Leftover Halloween candy & other snacks – It’s become a tradition for my husband and me to go out on the day after a major candy holiday (mostly Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Easter) and get a few bags full at half-off. It’s really the only times we buy candy, and then we split it between the 4 of us in our family, and make it last as long as we can. I tend to stress eat when I’m writing. It’s not a good habit, but one I can’t seem to shake during NaNo.

6. Full stock of coffee – For me, this is about more than the caffeine. I enjoy coffee, cappuccino, or hot chocolate when I’m settling in for my writing time simply for the taste. And the warmth, since it tends to be cold here during November.

7. Thumb drive – Somewhere I have a thumb drive with my writing backed up on it. It’s probably 2 years out of date, since there’s no way I was organized enough to back anything up during last year’s NaNoWriMo. I’ll have to dig it out, catch it up, and then use it to store my writing on. I tend to go back and forth between my laptop and desktop, because the laptop is upstairs in my bedroom where it’s quiet, but sometimes it’s nice to be at my desktop–more comfortable, amongst the people (downsides there, of course), and usually warmer.

8. AlphaSmart Neo

I did an entire blog post on this already, so I won’t go into much detail here. This will be my first NaNo with it, and I am really looking forward to it. I’ve already gotten quite a bit of use out of it during prep time. In fact, after using it for 3 days to “interview” one of my main characters as a way to break through some blocks, I had transferred the writing to my computer, and tried to finish it there. But it just wasn’t the same, and I couldn’t quite focus. This thing may transform the way I do NaNoWriMo. Or it may just be a fun toy. (Though if nothing else, it will definitely come in incredibly useful for writing away from the house.) Either way, I’m hooked!

What’s in your NaNoWriMo survival kit? Are you prepared for November 1st?

Daily Writing Check-in: October 23, 2017

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Words/Time: 312 words writing practice & 1 hour NaNoPrep

I did some writing practice with prompts, which is where the words came from. Some of it was about Vin, some of it was not.

Then I worked for 1 hour trying to make sense of the gaping plot hole I discovered while outlining yesterday. I had hit on some possible answers during my brainstorming yesterday, but I couldn’t quite organize my thoughts. So I got out my Neo and I did something that I’ve rarely done before. I started asking questions of Vin to see if he could help me make sense of my questions.

I still feel a little odd when I do this (or maybe just admitting that I do this), but it worked wonders. I still have some more to figure out, but his explanations for some of what I knew had to happen, but didn’t know why, made sense. I’ll definitely have to continue this line of questioning later.

I am acutely aware of how close NaNoWriMo is, and I don’t feel remotely prepared. Hopefully this crunch time will really drive my creativity.

For anyone out there who is participating in NaNoWriMo, feel free to check out my series of tips and tricks for the month, and also to add me as a writing buddy! (Let me know you came from here, and I’ll add you back!)