Novel in a month

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

calendar update: I'm apparently the only one who wrote yesterday, which puts me in the lead.

But I'm think EUOL has the right idea, and I probably won't write anythign I hope to eventually make money on in the future. So today will be personal history and stuff.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Now would be a cool time to repost the link to the page if you want me to read your story eric, 17 pages of posts is mildly daunting.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

ah, but if you hit reply, than you have the whole history there.

But to make it easy, the calendar is at http://www.writers-group.org/NaNoWriMo

[Gemm: Rock & Roll Star; Born to Rock]

Oy, well my weekend was something of one of those things people say are a bad thing. Since right now I just want to know how hard I have to hit my head against a wall to make the pounding inside it go away. Anywho, to tell you how much I wrote would be an overstatement. I tried saturday, just sitting there, thinking of how to get this thing going. Then out of no where I'm in bed and it's 10:30 pm. So again, I tried today, but no luck. I've gotten 1, maybe 2 sentences down but nothing. I'm not giving up, but for some reason I just couldn't do anything this weekend. It's probably because I should have been home doing all sorts of things and hanging out with friends, but lucky me gets to stay up here. Fortunately my roommate took me home with him, so that was cool. And so I end with my weekend being completely... um baddened. Now I await the airing of that Family Guy episode I've been looking forward to for the past week or so. It will be good.

[stacer]

Gemm, have you ever done rushwrites to get you going? You can do it with practically anything as a jumpstarter--it can be a newspaper clipping, a quote, something a news anchor just said, or more random things. I have a book called The Writer's Book of Days, that has a writing prompt for every day of the month. Some of the prompts are really quite silly, and with most you'll end up with something that has nothing to do with your current project, but think of it as a warm-up exercise, like you were a musician or an athlete. If you write a paragraph or two on some random thing (and this is one of those things in which you even write the "um"s and the "I can't think of what to write next"s), it might be enough to get you into writing mode.

[Mistress of Darkness]

I may have to try that stacer. Friday night was shot because I babysat my nephew and then was in movie watching mode by the time his parents came to pick him up at 8.

Saturdays are very bad, since me likes to watch the toons in the morning and we have rping in the afternoon.

And Sundays I always have big plans, but end up chilling out, which is probably a good thing. Never could manage to do any homework on Sundays either.

I am now so far behing that I am planning on using Kije's method of 1200 words, break, 1200 words, break, until it's time to sleep. A very kind EUOL lent me his laptop, so I can write during lunches now too. I have to catch up!

Speaking of which, my husband has responded to my requests of no more DW4 and WC:FT, at least until the end of Nov, with the decision to write the story of his favorite rp character. Sounds like he's more of a one drafter, so I don't think he will be joining us.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

no warcraft?
That man loves you more than you know.

[Gemm: Rock & Roll Star; Born to Rock]

/me swings a golf club a la Bob Hope.

Well folks, Thursday I got a whopping total of 575 words done.  I haven't typed in sunday's total yet (since I did not write on friday or saturday).

Now, I'm not saying I'm out. I'm not saying I'm giving up. I'm just saying I'm going to go for a different goal. Maybe 25,000. Maybe. I don't know. All I do know is that I'll get as much done as I can.

This John Johnly signing off.

[Mistress of Darkness]

Wimp!! I'm 1,000 words behind and I'm not giving up yet.

Well, I'm not going to school either, so. . . .

And yes, my husband does love me, though the same could be said about you to your wife .

For some reason the violent games (yes, WC & DW4 count as violent to me, won't let anything worse in my house) are making me anxious lately. I'll probably be fine after the stress has passed.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

Now folks, don't feel down if you think you're not going to get 50k. 50k is deliberately a difficult goal. But shoot for it, and see how far you get. Even 25k or 15k in a month is pretty good for most people, and nothing to spit at. It's longer than most novellas published in TLE, and it's a great beginning point for a novel. So, yeah, feel good about yourself even if you only get several thousand.

Yeah, my wife loves me. She's been amazingly tolerant (until the weekend, actually, when she got mad, I'm hoping it's just a phase). We should all acknowledge our spouses (those of us who have them, anyway) and their role in this).

[stacer]

MoD and Gemm, if you like I can post a few of the writing prompts I have. It might be pretty big for a post if you want them all, but I could email them as Word attachments (these aren't from the book I was talking about, they're from Writer's Digest.com, which emails them to me every month).

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

This is the kind of thing we were doing with squibs on w-g.org. We have a mechanic in place to send them, we just never launched it (we wanted to launch the whole site at once). I'll be happy to email the list of them we had. Automatic Writing is cool.

[Mistress of Darkness]

I think I need help outlining, or giving up on perfect dialogue. In fact things would be better if I would accept the fact that I don't know how to fight, so all of the writing I do about that is going to be crap, but that's the point!!.

I'd appreciate any tips you have for making me sit my butt down and write.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

MoD, I'll be happy to work with you on outlining, msg me when I get home (2.5 hours or so from now). or you can email me here at work ([email protected]).

As for sitting down, it's all discipline. Have your husband hold you to it. Er.. this is going in an unpleasant direction, so I'll make a course correction.

Have someone remind you, keep talking about it to everyone's annoyance so that you're expected to do it. Set up a reward system maybe: no chocolate (or whatever) until you write your 1200 (or whatever), and then you get a nice treat. I don't recommend all awards be food, unless your spouse likes the chubby thing, but also stear clear of buying things (unless you're independently wealthy).  

See the thing is, unlike previous times, I'm finding that I actually WANT to be wriitng this. I busted out a bunch of reviews for TWG this morning so I'd stop feeling like I had other obligations (I still have a lot, but that will assuage guilt for a bit). So.. uh... does any of that help?

[Mistress of Darkness]

Aha! Annoy people, what a good idea. . .wait. Still it's seems to help. At least talking about it during the day, makes me more excited about actually working on it that night.

Yes, that does help. I'm just not sure what, outside of chocolate and new clothes will be inspiring modivation. Maybe I'll pick up some Dove minis. One every 1,200 words (so that works out to about 36 over the course of a month and they are 42 calories a piece--shouldn't be too bad). I'll have to give them to my husband to hide though . . .