The NaNoWriMo Experience/Reactions

Jennifer said...

You want to know what I am going through? I am going through a frog attack. There are frogs. In my novel. Out for blood. In my very totally absolutely serious novel about the downfall and loss of humanity and identity. Frogs. Why? (There is a totally calm voice inside me now. She is remembering everything she learned during university and studying literature. She calmly informs me that is makes perfect sense that nature fights back and will win. That the humans have lost their connection to nature and now nature, symbolised by the frogs, is starting to fight back. Great. I could not have found a blunter way to state that right? ).
Otherwise I am fine. Now that I have given up being sane I am having that much more fun. I wait for the zombies. And pirates. I'm sure where there are frogs, there are pirates. Both live in the water...right?

Now excuse me, I have to go. The frogs are adamant, they want their bloodbath.

Want more? Read here: http://jennifer-renner.blogspot.com/
Click here

Cheers,

Jenny

November 7, 2009 9:21 AM

Niz said...

Last year, I started 3 days late, had glandular fever for about a month (a week of which I spent sleeping and barely drinking let alone eating) and yet I still managed to make up with the last 30,000 words being written on the last two days...

THIS year, I'm having trouble. I'm just behind on the word count, by about a 1,000 words (though I was doing extremely well up till two days ago) and I have a ton of work to do - university assignments as well as general house-cleaning etc.

I did have a cool plot, planned out, with in-depth characters for this year...but ended up scrapping it on the first day of November, in favour of a novel based on a single good scene I wrote last year. Although that scene was good, and I have since written a delightfully humorous scene, my novel is going nowhere fast!

Sleep will probably get more sporadic as November gets on, due to time contraints because of various presentations and essays I have due. Joyous.

However, I'm still loving the NaNoWriMo experience and tweeting heartily about it at @TheVeganOne (twitter.com/TheVeganOne Click here). Tat is, when my crazy housemate decides to *unblock* Twitter access since he thinks that unless I reach my daily wordcount total, I shouldn't be allowed to tweet.

One lats thing: I have every intention of eventually making it to a write-in. Ahem. So far, nothing has materialised but I've made up for this, imo, by using words such as copious, imbibed and cleavage (heh) in my novel.

Niz

November 7, 2009 12:21 PM

Mary Elizabeth said...

I'm new to NaNoWriMo this year, spurred on by encouragement from my daughter (@feedmenow Click here), and am still getting acclimated as I work on volume one of a mixed-genre quintology for YA and up.

I got started late (i.e., yesterday, November 7), partly because I couldn't complete my sign-up due to the enormous email overload at NaNoWriMo in the first couple of days of November.

But I think three factors will help me "catch up":

• Having been a published writer for 29 years, I know that I produce my best, most coherent work by engaging in a long period of planning and a short, sustained, concentrated period of writing.

• It is not unusual for me to write 3000–7000 words a day for work, so the "daily word count" doesn't faze me.

• I am secure enough in my approach to easily bypass the avalanche of annoyingly dogmatic (and—in many cases—specious ;^) advice about how one should write that is engulfing the web.

Yesterday, I finished the first three chapters (5777 words), the first of which has been in various incarnations since May. For me, whether writing non-fiction or fiction, the "drive on and don't look back" advice doesn't work: I need to lay a firm foundation in order to build a unified product.

For more of my thoughts on NaNoWriMo and other topics, you can follow me on Twitter as @AWriterReads (http://twitter.com/awriterreads Click here) and visit my (new and still unfolding) website at http://voiceofthephoenix.com Click here

Mary Elizabeth