Monday, November 17, 2008

Another Nano Update

Hey all. Been working hard on the book the past two weeks. Fell behind a little last week when most of us caught a stomach bug. Everyone's fine now, thanks for asking.

So, we're a little past the halfway point. Which means I should have more than 25,000 words written. And how many do I have? Pause for suspense.... 31,000! The story is the same premise I started out with, but it's not going the way I thought it would. A secondary character has jumped out and demanded attention. A beloved character came to a shocking end. And my murderer is not who I thought it was!

Thirteen more days to write 19,000 more words. Yep, pretty sure I'll get there and I may have even wrapped the story up by then! They group that sponsors this every year announced that another sponsor will print and bind any novel written this November, so I might actually see my book in print!

Monday, November 3, 2008

NaNoWriMo Update

For those following, November first was the first day of NaNoWriMo. (For those not following: Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month. Basically, I signed up to write a fifty thousand word novel between November 1st and November 30th. All for nothing but the knowledge that I can do it.) Did it start off with a bang? More like a fizzle. The girls bowl on Saturday mornings, so I wasn't around to work on it. Then Jason came home. Then my parents came back with the little kids, who wanted to go outside and play while Daddy and Grandpa worked on getting the rest of the fence up. Then after dinner, Jason used the laptop to play games all night.

I have a calendar that has it all worked out how many words per day you need to get to reach fifty thousand. It's basically one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven. My grand total at the end of day one? Thirty. Yep, I'm smokin' up the keyboard!

After venting to my mentor, I got a fresh start on Sunday. On and off through the day, I would sit down at the computer and type out something. The expected total at the end of day two? Three thousand three hundred and thirty-three. My total? About thirty-one hundred. Not so bad. I might catch up.

This morning dawned early (could have to do with daylight savings) and in between getting kids fed and on buses, my story was coming along. I'm trying to work in the names of family and friends, although :disclaimer: any similarities between characters and real people either living or dead is purely coincidental. I was IMing my sister in law Julie about just having added a character with her name. I don't know if she ever got the other IM that said I think my Julie character is going to come to a bad end. :D Nothing personal, Jules!!

So, NaNoWriMo calendar total for the end of day three? C'mon math majors! Okay, it's five thousand. I know, daunting, right? My total at the end of day three? About eighty-two hundred. Woohoo! I'm ahead of the game! And I haven't even killed anyone yet!

Okay, well, I'm going to let my fingers and wrists have a break. I'll keep y'all updated on how it's going.