Forums » Smalltalk » Nanowrimo 2017

Hosted a write-in last night and then got food poisoning. 🤐 Still managed to hit my word count for the day... but we'll see how today goes. I'm in pretty rough shape, man.

Oh no!! I hope you feel better soon!!

Definitely working on it, thank you though. <: )

On the plus side, I took the day off to recover and between all of that have been drabbling to add to the olde word count, lol. I hope you all have a productive day today!

Good, I'm glad! It's important to take time to recover.

I am! I'm sittin' comfy on 8,391 words. I'm trying to be ahead by a few days because I know I probably won't be able to write on Saturday or Sunday.

Heimdall convinced me to finally go for it this year! I fully expect to be consistently under par and it's highly unlikely I'll 'win' on my first attempt here, but I'm excited to at least give it a strong shot. I'm also definitely a plantser; got a rough idea as to the course of events, but a definitively solid ending.

Welcome to the madness! Sometimes it's not about hitting the 50K mark, it's about having whatever you get out the other end as a seed to play with, edit, update, and re-do to a more polished thing in the future. ;u; The suffering is worth it!

Heck yeeeah, that's the plan! THANKEE. It's basically just a big ol' fire under my butt to inspire - one I've avoided for too long, haha! I believe the words were "JUST DO IT".

Heck yes! Welcome to Nano!!
Indeed, all you need to do is just give it your best shot! Don't worry about anything else, just believe in yourself and give it what you've got!
I'm a firm believer in the idea that "the mindset makes the man", so if you start out thinking you won't finish (like I've seen several friends do this year), your attitude will affect your writing! So I really like your attitude of giving it a strong shot, because that's really all you can do!
Best of luck!

Attitude can have a pretty deep impact on your ability to finish, yeah, but also don't think that because you're uncertain that you're going to finish! It's really hard to know ahead of time how you're going to fare, and if the idea of 50K is making you quake in your boots -- or if today's 1667 seem impassably daunting when you're 150 words into today's count and feel like you've already been working forever -- I think the most important thing is to not look too many steps ahead. Try to gently sidestep the paralysis of feeling intimidated, if bulling through the bad feelings isn't your style.

So this year's been a bit of a tall task for me thus far, as I started off on a really bad mental health day and have been struggling with a lot of brainweasels. I've been hitting wordcount, though. There's a couple things I've been doing:

Break each day's wordcounts into 500-word increments. I'm writing using http://writtenkitten.net/ which is kind of a treat for myself, but also, the box isn't really big enough to hold more than 500 words. I'll do 500 in there, copy and paste it into my master doc, and then feel the warm glow of having accomplished a significant proportion of today's count. (And I only need to do that 100 times overall! Woohoo!)

Try and think of things by scene rather than by wordcount. This goes two ways: either it means that I finish one scene, go, oh dear, not enough words to make today's count, and start another scene, which ends up leaving me above the day's basic wordcount. Hooray! Or, if I think tomorrow's going to be difficult, I'll intentionally start writing a scene once I've hit my basic count and then stop, leaving a little starter for my tomorrow-self, which makes it a lot easier to start.

NEVER. EDIT. Don't even try and go back and change the previous paragraph. I will very occasionally delete and re-write a sentence, but barring the contingency of needing to go back and confirm a piece of continuity, I never read my own previous NaNo writing until the end of the month. Too easy to get lost in the details.

Go to write-ins in your area! Dray and I are hosting some of this year's in our city, and honestly, even as hosts they're super productive. There's nothing for lighting a fire under your butt like being in a room with a bunch of other people currently writing. You never wanna be the one guy playing an app game while everyone else is busy scowling madly at their screens and tippatapping away like demons.

Good luck and good writing! It's a heck of a prospect to tackle 50K in a month, but you're in good company.