NaNoWriMo, Day 5: A Gothic Horror Fest

Nick Miller is all of us sometimes.

Oof. Remind me never to try and research, write, AND script for a separate non-Nano project in the same month. My brain feels completely fried today -- not least because I woke up at 2AM last night and couldn't get back to sleep.

On the bright side, I was up so early that I was able to get in about 2000 words of writing. AND I was able to move on from story #1 and into story #2, which is a historical gothic horror fest, based on a chapter of a lesser-known book in a very famous eight part series.

Story #3 is going to be interesting. That one's roughly based on a weird cities-only counterculture movement happening here in the US, although I have no idea what the main plot is there. All I have so far is the title.

We'll find out more when we get to it! Until then, sleep.

NaNoWriMo, Day 3

There's always that one stupid word.

Writing is going okay! Went over my word count on day one, floundered yesterday, and hit a middling stride today that ended about twenty minutes ago. I'm essentially a "day" behind, average pace considered, but hopefully it's nothing the weekend or writing an extra hour for the next few days can't fix.

Is anyone else having trouble with the word count function on Nano's website? It didn't register any of my daily totals until today. Everything hit at once after I validated it in the settings menu. Weird.

First story is mainly slow going because I am faking futuristic legal jargon left and right. Somebody is going to have to help me lawyerpick this thing once I'm through.

This is what lawyers say, right? According to my dad, I should have been one. It could've been me!

Can't wait until I'm done with story #1 and can move on to something much less focused on corporate and constitutional law! Story #2 is set on the snowy frontier, and is an introspective look into the life of an (infamous) homesteading family.

NaNoWriMo 2016: Everything's Wrong, But It's All Right

Well, it finally happened. I signed up for NaNoWriMo. Here was my immediate reaction once I registered:

Kidding! It looked more like this:

My project is an anthology of 10 short stories, since I did not have enough prep time to work on this year's big novel. (That's gonna require a lot more research and time.) Still. I'm nervous, and I made myself start announcing it online to keep from backing out at the eleventh hour, haha.

Bottom line: although I've written novel-length stories before - hell, I've even written 50K in a month before - I'm still afraid of "getting things wrong" in a big unedited draft that's written over 30 days. Which is why this blog by Chuck Wendig is so, so timely.

...in getting it ‘wrong’ you may already be getting it right. We often like to think of ‘right’ as being a replicable thing, a series of examples from those who came before. But also remember that many of the greatest successes in fiction are those who took a hard left turn away from HOW IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DONE — they drove right off the cliff, and in that, did something new, something different, something very much wrong. Wrong is right and right is wrong and nobody can much tell which side is up and which side is down. Dogs and cats living together. Go forth. Embrace wrong. Nobody knows anything. Seize the freedom that comes with that."

So I'm gonna keep that in mind this month: everything's wrong, but it's all right.

Let's rock Nano and get that 50K in the bank!