So I have hit just over 20k on my first week of Nano and am quite rightly over the moon about it, but something terrible has happened. An idea for a second novel, a fantasy novel, has popped into my head and I have been faced with the most awful dilemma. What should I do about it?
I have written down the idea and made some notes on character names and places but thats about it... well actually it isn't whilst sat at work the other day I wrote the first chapter/ prologue. Unfortunately we are losing our external email and internet access at work tomorrow so I had to email my writing to myself so that I did not lose it. Knowing as I did that it might distract me from the novel i am writing for Nanowrimo I composed a letter to myself for the email attached to the file and I thought I would post it here as it's quite funny:
This is the excerpt you wrote on that lunch the other day- hopefully by the time you've read this you will have completed the final 1300 words for today, if not no chocolate for you tonight!!!!
You are not allowed to open this until you finish novel one- do not even think about it even though you want to- I know you are thinking about it now so Stop it Stop it stop it!
You will never be able to finish 1 if 2 is in your head
PS novel 2 can be commenced in approx 2 weeks if you get your act together!!!
BTW I did complete the final 1300 words if you were wondering and the chocolate was eaten.
Sunday, 7 November 2010
Saturday, 6 November 2010
One week in...
Ok so, I am one week in and I have already committed mass murder by killing of three people no less, two of which were... children! so not only am I a mass murderer but I am also a child killer, and there is more death to come.
It has been a difficult week and an exhausting week. This was my first full week at work and my first attempt at writing 3k words a day and it was hard, challenging but also fun and rewarding. 3k may seem quite a high target when the minimum you can do for nano each day to hit your target is 1667, but I write regularly anyway and whilst I could have done the 1667, I prefer to write in chapters and have been aiming to do a chapter a day, and for me a chapter works out at 3-5 scenes at around 3k words in total.
Throughout the week my preferred method of writing was doing approx 1-1500 words before work and then the rest after work,or alternatively writing on my lunch hour, when i could not write before work. I was surprised by exactly how well I committed myself to the task in hand despite the many committments i had outside work. When I think about it I know that I worked 35 hours had 5 hours worth of work lunches the last two of which i wrote in, I also had guiding and also dance classes and yet I managed to schedule in enough hours to do my nanowrimo.
As the week wore on it did get more and more difficult to write, but for me this was because I was exhausted and ran out of steam. Yesterday was a bad day for me. I did not write before work, I then managed only 500 words on my lunch hour which i knew were dreadful and I had written 1000 only the day before in the same time of approximately 30 mins after i had done all my other tasks i do at lunch like eating and so on. When I got home I could not motivate myself to write 2500 words, I was too tired and i knew that what i had already done was nowhere near good enough. Holes had started appearing in my research and I had no names for the minor charactors who were new to my plot, I could not even come up with names for them off the top of my head.
I had to take a break from nano, even if it was for one night only. I went onto our Nano region chatroom but word sprints were going on and it just made me feel worse than I already did. so I logged out of the forums and the chatrooms had a few games of solitaire and spider solitaire,turned off my computer and went to bed. As a result I woke up feeling much better, and even more beneficial to me, my main characters inner voice had returned. She had gone on a days holiday on friday but now she was back and she was talking to me and telling me her story once more. In the three hours that we had in our Nanowrimo meet up for our region in gloucester I wrote 2000 words despite being surrounded by distractions of children, a very busy coffee shop and also the alarms on the coffee machines. I was really pleased with myself and this evening I easily completed my last 1000 words. Yes its true that I am still technically 3000 words behind where i ideally wanted to be, but I don't care and I am still going to make it. Besides I may still catch up anyway.
so 6 days in 15500 words down and 34500 words to go approx. Yay!!!
It has been a difficult week and an exhausting week. This was my first full week at work and my first attempt at writing 3k words a day and it was hard, challenging but also fun and rewarding. 3k may seem quite a high target when the minimum you can do for nano each day to hit your target is 1667, but I write regularly anyway and whilst I could have done the 1667, I prefer to write in chapters and have been aiming to do a chapter a day, and for me a chapter works out at 3-5 scenes at around 3k words in total.
Throughout the week my preferred method of writing was doing approx 1-1500 words before work and then the rest after work,or alternatively writing on my lunch hour, when i could not write before work. I was surprised by exactly how well I committed myself to the task in hand despite the many committments i had outside work. When I think about it I know that I worked 35 hours had 5 hours worth of work lunches the last two of which i wrote in, I also had guiding and also dance classes and yet I managed to schedule in enough hours to do my nanowrimo.
As the week wore on it did get more and more difficult to write, but for me this was because I was exhausted and ran out of steam. Yesterday was a bad day for me. I did not write before work, I then managed only 500 words on my lunch hour which i knew were dreadful and I had written 1000 only the day before in the same time of approximately 30 mins after i had done all my other tasks i do at lunch like eating and so on. When I got home I could not motivate myself to write 2500 words, I was too tired and i knew that what i had already done was nowhere near good enough. Holes had started appearing in my research and I had no names for the minor charactors who were new to my plot, I could not even come up with names for them off the top of my head.
I had to take a break from nano, even if it was for one night only. I went onto our Nano region chatroom but word sprints were going on and it just made me feel worse than I already did. so I logged out of the forums and the chatrooms had a few games of solitaire and spider solitaire,turned off my computer and went to bed. As a result I woke up feeling much better, and even more beneficial to me, my main characters inner voice had returned. She had gone on a days holiday on friday but now she was back and she was talking to me and telling me her story once more. In the three hours that we had in our Nanowrimo meet up for our region in gloucester I wrote 2000 words despite being surrounded by distractions of children, a very busy coffee shop and also the alarms on the coffee machines. I was really pleased with myself and this evening I easily completed my last 1000 words. Yes its true that I am still technically 3000 words behind where i ideally wanted to be, but I don't care and I am still going to make it. Besides I may still catch up anyway.
so 6 days in 15500 words down and 34500 words to go approx. Yay!!!
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
Honesty is the best policy
Just wanted to give you an update on my Nano progress. To date i am just short of 10k and doing well so far. One of my main problems at the moment is that I am spending all my writing time on my Nano and so i know my blog is suffering for which i apologise. I think if it wasn't for the fact that i work full time and am doing funny hours this week it wouldn't be so bad, but it is the way it is and what i've been doing is an hour before work in the mornings and then an hour or two until i hit my 3k target in the evenings starting at ten pm.
So sorry if i have been neglecting you but I am updating my twitter page with my progress too and twitter updates appear to the right hand side of this page so as long as i've updated for the day I have an excuse.
Whilst nano is on my blog posts will inevitably be more infrequent however I will do a minimum of 2 blog posts a week to keep you updated.
To all the other Nano participants this year good luck to you.
_________________________
9119/50000 words
So sorry if i have been neglecting you but I am updating my twitter page with my progress too and twitter updates appear to the right hand side of this page so as long as i've updated for the day I have an excuse.
Whilst nano is on my blog posts will inevitably be more infrequent however I will do a minimum of 2 blog posts a week to keep you updated.
To all the other Nano participants this year good luck to you.
_________________________
9119/50000 words
Monday, 1 November 2010
and the race is on for me vs me: NANOWRIMO Day 1
This is a very short post as it has been a very long day.
I stayed up to midnight on the 31st October and I wrote 1k words and upon return from guiding tonight (and after work) I wrote another 2k although I cannot post this on the NANOWRIMO sight as it has been up and down like a yoyo today.
With 3k done I am officially cream crackered and looking forward to sleeping in 30secs time. Todays chapter was also difficult but the characters voice (its a first person point of view) seems to have got louder in my head and I feel like she is telling me her story and I am just writing it down and not so much the creator.
Fingers crossed this continues, and I will try and get a word count tracker for on here to show my progress tomorrow but for now....
1 day down 3k written and 47k to go so thats 3000/50000
I stayed up to midnight on the 31st October and I wrote 1k words and upon return from guiding tonight (and after work) I wrote another 2k although I cannot post this on the NANOWRIMO sight as it has been up and down like a yoyo today.
With 3k done I am officially cream crackered and looking forward to sleeping in 30secs time. Todays chapter was also difficult but the characters voice (its a first person point of view) seems to have got louder in my head and I feel like she is telling me her story and I am just writing it down and not so much the creator.
Fingers crossed this continues, and I will try and get a word count tracker for on here to show my progress tomorrow but for now....
1 day down 3k written and 47k to go so thats 3000/50000
Sunday, 31 October 2010
No more chocolate!
It's been a busy day today. I had my first Nanowrimo meet up which was so much fun and the people are so nice and now I can't wait to start on Nano I am counting down the hours already and plan to start writing at midnight (despite being on an early shift tomorrow!)
It's been busy tonight as well. My parents do not do halloween and last year we didn't do it either as were working and had other stuff going on. This year we decided to do it and I spent hours cutting up bin liners to frame the porch with I put an orange sainsburys carrier bag over the porch light, printed off pictures of pumpkins and posters with 'knock if you dare' and 'Happy halloween' on which I then coloured in (I had no colour ink only black). We had two bags of bitesize chocolates- Mars and Maltesers and I tipped them into a bowl and then had another bowl which i filled with newspaper and tissues etc and then covered each with newspaper and the kids had to choose between each bag.
Within half an hour the Mars and Maltesers were gone, so i went digging in the cupboard and tipped in a packet of penguins- we had more kids and those went too! my housemate came home and she had some club bars so we put those in and then they went. At 8pm we'd run out and we must have had 35 kids in all based on the amount of chocolate they went through and we had groups of 4, 5 and 6. The kids were like buses it would be quiet for 15 mins and then we would have people knocking every few minutes 3 or 4 groups at a time. It was crazy!!! Finally, we ran out of chocs unfortunately so I took down the decorations and turned off all the lighting and to date we have had no other visitors.
My only disappointment is that all the chocs are gone :-(
It's been busy tonight as well. My parents do not do halloween and last year we didn't do it either as were working and had other stuff going on. This year we decided to do it and I spent hours cutting up bin liners to frame the porch with I put an orange sainsburys carrier bag over the porch light, printed off pictures of pumpkins and posters with 'knock if you dare' and 'Happy halloween' on which I then coloured in (I had no colour ink only black). We had two bags of bitesize chocolates- Mars and Maltesers and I tipped them into a bowl and then had another bowl which i filled with newspaper and tissues etc and then covered each with newspaper and the kids had to choose between each bag.
Within half an hour the Mars and Maltesers were gone, so i went digging in the cupboard and tipped in a packet of penguins- we had more kids and those went too! my housemate came home and she had some club bars so we put those in and then they went. At 8pm we'd run out and we must have had 35 kids in all based on the amount of chocolate they went through and we had groups of 4, 5 and 6. The kids were like buses it would be quiet for 15 mins and then we would have people knocking every few minutes 3 or 4 groups at a time. It was crazy!!! Finally, we ran out of chocs unfortunately so I took down the decorations and turned off all the lighting and to date we have had no other visitors.My only disappointment is that all the chocs are gone :-(
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Still plodding along
I am happy today. Why you may ask? Well I did more work on chapter 12 and it is now complete - well sort of as I had to split it into two chapters and so the second half of chapter 12 is about to become chapter 13 which I will be working on in the next day or so.
I am really happy about this as from my previous posts you probably saw that I had been struggling a bit with this chapter and although I need to do some editing etc., it is almost there. What makes this all the more special is I actually have been working today and did a full day shift but still managed to come home and do 1500 words so I know that I will be able to cope when NANOWRIMO begins on monday.
As for whether I am sticking with my current plan of working on the stepmother for nano or whether I write something completely different and totally unplanned I haven't decided yet but I think I probably will stick with this idea for now and work on the next novel after NANO.
On the negative side I have sacrificed my zumba class tonight to stay in, however, as i'm still suffering from the cold that I previously mentioned and am also working til late I had very little time to squeeze the class in.
Oh well.
So now I am going to reward myself with some Nanoforums yay!
I am really happy about this as from my previous posts you probably saw that I had been struggling a bit with this chapter and although I need to do some editing etc., it is almost there. What makes this all the more special is I actually have been working today and did a full day shift but still managed to come home and do 1500 words so I know that I will be able to cope when NANOWRIMO begins on monday.
As for whether I am sticking with my current plan of working on the stepmother for nano or whether I write something completely different and totally unplanned I haven't decided yet but I think I probably will stick with this idea for now and work on the next novel after NANO.
On the negative side I have sacrificed my zumba class tonight to stay in, however, as i'm still suffering from the cold that I previously mentioned and am also working til late I had very little time to squeeze the class in.
Oh well.
So now I am going to reward myself with some Nanoforums yay!
Tuesday, 26 October 2010
You're only as good as you think you are
Well it's been a very busy couple of days for me, what with trips to ikea in Bristol for bookcases, new car batteries and then back to work today. I've got to tell you that I'm a bit knackered.
I had planned this weekend to go to a pre-Nano meet up but I ended up waiting in all day for a plumber... who then didn't turn up, so I didn't go. I should have instead spent the day working on chapter 12 whilst waiting for him to arrive, but I didn't.
It's strange as I had been looking forward to writing this particular chapter since I started writing the novel's first chapter, but I found it difficult to sit down and write it, not so much due to time constraints, but due to the excuses I kept coming up with not to write it. Finally, I forced myself to start, and tonight prior to this post I have written 2000 words or so, and I think I know why I had such trouble just getting on with it.
Chapter 12 is a very important part of the whole book and features some hugely key scenes and the deaths of some characters and these deaths are pivotal in my novel as they set my MC on her path of destiny so to speak. When I planned the novel in my head, I imagined that it would be a great thing to write, words would come easily to me and it would show off my writing talent to it's full potential. I thought that when I read it back I would go 'Wow, that's amazing! I wrote that'.
So what was the problem?
I had put so much pressure on myself to make this an excellent chapter and planned things so well that when it came to writing it I was scared. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to do such great ideas (which I think they are) justice and then this would affect the tone of the whole book and in effect demotivate me and ruin the novel. So I procrastinated and thought negative thoughts and this reinforced my negativity towards the chapter to the extent that I was dreading writing it. In the end my only solution to the problem was to 'just write', and so laptop in hand and opening line ready I just...wrote. It has been the hardest chapter I have had to write so far in terms of just doing it and it is the only one I have not completed in one go when I had the opportunity (I did one chapter the other day in 2 sittings because I had to go out).
So what happens next?
I know that it will be a few days now until my next chapter (and next post too), now that I am working and also I won't have time tomorrow due to shift patterns at work, dance class after work and just generally lack of free time, so I am targeting myself to finish the chapter by the end of the week, and then I will go from there. I may post less often this week for the same reason so apologies in advance for this.
On another note Nano starts in less than a week - yay!- and I am faced with a dilemma- do I carry on with this novel which is planned out and has approx 55k to go or alternatively I have been flooded with ideas for another novel- but this one fantasy- which randomly came to me when I went shopping. Problem with novel Idea 2 is that lots of planning is needed and I don't have time, so I'm going to think on it and decide what I'm going to do. Any suggestions would be welcome.
I had planned this weekend to go to a pre-Nano meet up but I ended up waiting in all day for a plumber... who then didn't turn up, so I didn't go. I should have instead spent the day working on chapter 12 whilst waiting for him to arrive, but I didn't.
It's strange as I had been looking forward to writing this particular chapter since I started writing the novel's first chapter, but I found it difficult to sit down and write it, not so much due to time constraints, but due to the excuses I kept coming up with not to write it. Finally, I forced myself to start, and tonight prior to this post I have written 2000 words or so, and I think I know why I had such trouble just getting on with it.
Chapter 12 is a very important part of the whole book and features some hugely key scenes and the deaths of some characters and these deaths are pivotal in my novel as they set my MC on her path of destiny so to speak. When I planned the novel in my head, I imagined that it would be a great thing to write, words would come easily to me and it would show off my writing talent to it's full potential. I thought that when I read it back I would go 'Wow, that's amazing! I wrote that'.
So what was the problem?
I had put so much pressure on myself to make this an excellent chapter and planned things so well that when it came to writing it I was scared. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to do such great ideas (which I think they are) justice and then this would affect the tone of the whole book and in effect demotivate me and ruin the novel. So I procrastinated and thought negative thoughts and this reinforced my negativity towards the chapter to the extent that I was dreading writing it. In the end my only solution to the problem was to 'just write', and so laptop in hand and opening line ready I just...wrote. It has been the hardest chapter I have had to write so far in terms of just doing it and it is the only one I have not completed in one go when I had the opportunity (I did one chapter the other day in 2 sittings because I had to go out).
So what happens next?
I know that it will be a few days now until my next chapter (and next post too), now that I am working and also I won't have time tomorrow due to shift patterns at work, dance class after work and just generally lack of free time, so I am targeting myself to finish the chapter by the end of the week, and then I will go from there. I may post less often this week for the same reason so apologies in advance for this.
On another note Nano starts in less than a week - yay!- and I am faced with a dilemma- do I carry on with this novel which is planned out and has approx 55k to go or alternatively I have been flooded with ideas for another novel- but this one fantasy- which randomly came to me when I went shopping. Problem with novel Idea 2 is that lots of planning is needed and I don't have time, so I'm going to think on it and decide what I'm going to do. Any suggestions would be welcome.
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