Saturday, November 01, 2014

November means Round 3 of NaNoWriMo

It's November once again and we all know what that means. It's NaNoWriMo month again!
Time to dust off those pencils, make sure those pens are full of ink and that the paper is crisp and ready. Or if you're a modern writing type, make sure your keyboard is in good working order and your word processor of choice has a working spell checker.

This is Round 3 on the NaNo challenge for me, I've tried and failed two years running. First year was an idea for a novel that just stalled, last year was an instructional manual for aspiring super villains. Both were really good ideas, I think anyway, but for varied reasons I have yet to finish out the month.

50,000 words in 30 days is a lot, unless you're my friend Kenneth Tam, he's not human. He's a machine. He generates 50,000 words while he's offline, I mean, while he sleeps. Me, not so much. I'm not bad at starting out, but keeping on a roll is the issue, keeping the ideas fresh and the story moving, I start running out of steam on a project of that magnitude.

So, I've decided on a new approach this year. I'm not to shabby at writing short stories, I've got four in print with Engen Books and Ink'd Well Comics. So that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to concentrate on a series of short stories featuring my characters Frank Kennington & Ryan Murphy, from my Full Moon series of shorts. I think in this way I can get through more and keep the pace going.

Like I said, the goal is 50,000 words for the month, that's 1667 words a day roughly. Right now for Day 1, I'm at 1685 words. Not bad for a night's work. Also, that's when most of my writing will be done, at night. Anyone who's followed me or read previous entries, knows that I work overnights, it can give me a jump if I start writing when I get up in the evening so I can hopefully hit better targets.

Now the problem that I've had, the biggest issue that I've had in the last two attempts, the main reason that I fall off track and can't get back on the pace. My Birthday is November 9th, and I like to celebrate that yearly milestone. Part of the celebrating causes me to lose one to two days of writing potential because it's really the last thing on my mind at the time.

This year I'm determined to write enough in the first eight days to give myself some padding, so that when I sit back down to write on the 10th of November, that I won't have much, if any catching up to do.

That's the plan, along with a blog entry a day to update how things are going, I know my friend Matt LeDrew will be happy about that, cause he's cheering for me to write more and finish my projects that have fallen by the wayside.

Thanks it for now. Oh, if you want to check in, here's my NaNo profile 

Later!

Stylin' Steve

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