NaNoWriMo 2012

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HowDroll

HowDroll

Who's doing it this year (besides BananaHands) ??

For those of you who aren't familiar, NaNoWriMo is a (free) event that happens every November in which participants try to write a 50,000+ word novel in one month. It's a lot of fun, and usually November is by far my most productive writing month of the year.

I've been doing NaNoWriMo since 2004. I think this is going to be my first 100k year -- I've tried a few times, and I've gotten close a few times, but I've ultimately fallen short.

So who else is in? I know there's a few of you who have done it in the past.
 
Dave

Dave

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I try this every year and never have any support at home. I thought I was last year but then my mom had her stroke and the year went to shit fast. I'll probably try it again this year. "The Chronicles of the Third" is dying to be written.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

I'd love to write stuff but I can't think of what to put in a novel. A steady diet of TV and Internet has rotted my brain.
 
LittleKagsin

LittleKagsin

Now that my novel is all written, I think I'll use the month of November to try and finish my first edit on it. Work on getting my query letter ready.
 
Zappit

Zappit

Staff member
I've wanted to try this for a few years, but haven't gotten the guts to make a serious run at it. I've been a comics writer, mostly, never really diving into the realm of prose. Got a couple ideas, though...

Okay, I'm going to take a shot here at overcoming those writer's nerves - is this opening bearable, a writing style you could stomach for an entire novel?

Opening


Captain James Moses awoke to a morning like most others. The computerized alarm refused to cease ringing until he was standing upright; only then would the shrill, tinny whine cease. He had requested a new sound be programmed into the alarm, but the administration staff had pushed that request to the very bottom of their priority list. So, like every other day, he started with a slight ringing in his ears and a mild compulsion to force his ears to pop. It only lasted a few minutes, but he had grown increasingly annoyed at this daily problem.

Moses gazed out of his window, a reinforced iron-glass shield nearly two feet thick, yet it provided a view much clearer than anything he had before his mission. The swirling dust clouds of the nebula reflected and refracted the light from the nearby Argos Star, creating a symphony of colors, a warm glow that enveloped and embraced his station, giving comfort to a crew so very far from home, whose sacred duty would prevent them from ever seeing home again.

James Moses was captain of the superstation Shadow, a vessel that carried the entire recorded history of the Earth, a treasure like none other, worth more to humanity than anything else. The Shadow was stationed in the Atlas Nebula, a massive dust cloud that possessed a bizarre and not completely understood property - it appeared to exist within a single moment, immune to the very passage of time. The discovery of Atlas was the turning point in mankind's history, a discovery that coincided with a deeper understanding of time, along with the theoretical power to alter history itself with the development of the Pandora Complex, a machine capable of deleting moments in time. Pandora could show its controller any point in time, and could even accurately predict the new timeline that would be created should the past be altered.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

The worst thing you could ever do when you're going to write is to ask someone else if you should. Either you have a story to tell or you don't. Don't crowdsource something before it's even been made.
 
Zappit

Zappit

Staff member
Fair 'nough. I was only looking for a smidge of feedback on if my style just sucked. But what the hell, I'll do it this year, already knocked out the first chapter, and will be on a good pace if I put in a few hundred more words today.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Well, I didn't think I'd have time to write and do my practicum program, but since the latter is no more...

I'm in!

I got me a second book to write. Though technically, I already have a headstart with about 10,000 words.[DOUBLEPOST=1351294573][/DOUBLEPOST]Hold the phone, the goal is only 50,000 words? Didn't it used to be higher, like 80k or something.

Psh. 50k's easy.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

I don't recommend doing this for a sequel to a soon-to-be published novel unless you're hurting for motivation/writer's block and need to force yourself forward. Because a NaNoWriMo novel, due to the crunch method of writing it, is going to need major overhaul in the editing room, to the point of being completely re-done at least once, and you don't need that with an eventual deadline of any kind. It's better for one-shots and experimenting (unless, as I said, there's a need to propel things forward due to some kind of slow-down).

I'm sort of tempted to try it under that, but I have so much editing to do on one project, stuff I need to write for my site, and the knowledge that Shit is going to go down in November that will make dedicating time to intense writing impossible.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

You certainly make a good point about the nature of Nanowrimo (I'd put the capitalization where needed, but I don't want to bother remembering. :p). Though I will say two things about it:

1) Although it was stretched out a little more, Dill's first adventure was written in a pretty short timespan, most especially the later chapters.
2) Honestly, I can't think of anything else I'd like to write. These days, my mind is just on this one novel. But then, I have a Type A personality, so I can't juggle several writing projects/ideas. Dill has been on my mind due to the final edits and changes to the first novel, as well as a recent meeting with fellow writers where I read the first chapter of the new book.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

ThatNickGuy said:
2) Honestly, I can't think of anything else I'd like to write. These days, my mind is just on this one novel. But then, I have a Type A personality, so I can't juggle several writing projects/ideas. Dill has been on my mind due to the final edits and changes to the first novel, as well as a recent meeting with fellow writers where I read the first chapter of the new book.
Click to expand...
It's fine that you're focused on Dill, but maybe that means putting the book before the... challenge? Goal? Whatever NaNoWriMo is. Putting it before NaNoWriMo in quality over quantity. Even the NaNoWriMo site explains that it will be a matter of quantity. Of course, writing it anyway is going to require a lot of overhaul. If one month of pushing at the very least gets a working draft, then it might be worth it even if the whole thing needs to be rewritten afterward. At the very least, you can figure out what doesn't work without it having taken five months of careful writing that needs to be scrapped anyway due to plot changes.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Quotemander Prime said:
It's fine that you're focused on Dill, but maybe that means putting the book before the... challenge? Goal? Whatever NaNoWriMo is. Putting it before NaNoWriMo in quality over quantity. Even the NaNoWriMo site explains that it will be a matter of quantity. Of course, writing it anyway is going to require a lot of overhaul. If one month of pushing at the very least gets a working draft, then it might be worth it even if the whole thing needs to be rewritten afterward. At the very least, you can figure out what doesn't work without it having taken five months of careful writing that needs to be scrapped anyway due to plot changes.
Click to expand...
Oi! Let me write my fucking armadillo!

Wanker. :p
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Exclusive, freshly written sneak peak into Dilbert Pinkerton's second adventure:

Strewn out on my bed like a perverse combination of Fantasmagoria and Playboy, a mountain of muscle in a man’s body laid bloody and beaten. At six-foot-nine, the meanest and toughest biker I knew had his beefy, leather-pants bound legs hung over the foot end of the bed. The blood-red road rashes masked the sizeable bruises all over his bare torso. Normally, he wore a leather vest with his gang’s patch on the back. Now, the only badges of honour he wore were those of violence. Welts, cuts, scrapes, rashes, and bruises covered just about every part of his body. Most of the cuts had already started to dry up, but he was still a mess. For the toughest man I’ve ever known, I’d never seen him in this trampled condition.

“Bison,” I said, holstering The Daymaker, “The hell’s going on, man?”
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Haven't updated in a bit, but...1,700 words written today. Including other writing days, the total is now 25,000 so far. Here's an excerpt, which I had so much fun writing, I was trying not to giggle while writing it in Starbucks:

We quietly laid there in our respective beds for a few minutes.
“Hey Bison?” I asked, still staring at the ceiling.
“Yeah, Dirk?”
“How do you know someone’s flirting with you?”
Bison burst out in the heartiest laugh I’d ever heard from him. And for Bison, that’s quite the feat, believe me.
“I knew it!” Bison exclaimed. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!”
He popped up onto his knees and bounced excitedly on the bed. He was like a kid who’d just woken up to their first day in Disney World.
“Details, man!” he demanded. “Details! Leave nothin’ out!”
“I think…” I started.
“Yeah? Yeah!?”
“I think you need to shut up and go to sleep.”
“Dirk! C’mon, man! Don’t hold back on the Head Honcho! If I can’t get none, I can at least live vicariously through you!”
“Wow, I didn’t figure you knew a word that big.”
“Don’t go changin’ no subjects on me dude!” he said, pointing a beefy, fingerless-gloved judgemental finger at me. “Did ya ask her out?”
“Well…no,” I said. “But I think…I think I have a date tomorrow? At the festival?”
“Yeah-heah, boy! That’s what the B-man’s talkin’ about!”
“Shut up,” I said to deaf ears. “I’m also canvasing for questions tomorrow, too.
“Oh, you let the Head Honcho handle that!” he said, still bouncing. The way landing on his knees and fists, he either looked like an excited gorilla or pro-wrestler Edge when he used to slide into the ring.
“What? No. No flipping way.”
“Oh yeah!” he shouted, bouncing. “Yer gona get off with you clothes off!”
“That ain’t gonna–”
“Yer gonna rock out with yer cock out!”
“Seriously, I’m totally wiped. Would you just–”
“Yer gonna…”
Klunk! Thump!
Bison was so excited, bouncing in circles on the bed that he didn’t see me unholster the Daymaker. Holding tight onto the barrel, I clocked him across the side of the head as hard as I could with the butt-end. Been a long time since I cold-cocked someone, but looked like I still got it. Bison flopped down onto the bed, his head perfectly hitting the pillow.
Roooonk. Wheeze. Roooonk. Wheeze.
Even conked out by unnatural means, he still started snoring loud enough to wake up the neighbors…in China. I ain’t sure, but I think he might even out-snore Tony. I’d have to put that to a test.
”Finally!” I exclaimed.
After shoving the Daymaker under my pillow, I closed my eyes and had myself a nice, peaceful sleep.
 
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