Woo hoo!I remember a time, back before I was a novelist. Some of you may recall. We weren't sure if 2012 would be the worst thing in the history of the world, or only the worst thing for about a week before New Moon arrived. No one thought it was possible to just stroll into a White House dinner and shake hands with the president and make Joe Biden fall for the "pull my finger" trick eight times in a row. The forces of goodness and righteousness still held out hope that Auburn would beat Alabama. No one but climatologists and conspiracy theorists knew what "CRU" was. We were all so young.
That's my way of saying I hit my target on NaNoWriMo. 50,045!
The book isn't finished. I'm guessing it's about 15,000 words away. My fault -- if I thought of a scene that would be funny, I'd put it in at the cost of advancing the plot more quickly. I hope to have it available for anyone who's interested by Christmas.
I highly recommend NaNoWriMo. It was a lot of fun, and a huge rush to finish (in more ways than one - on Thanksgiving I was at 32k. If any of you tried to talk to me over the weekend, please try again). In April, there's something similar with scriptwriting.
But now it's done, and I can turn my attention back to what's important: the War on Christmas. Happy Holidays, all!
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7 comments:
Congrats! I heard about NaNoWriMo about November 7th, so I had a convenient excuse not to participate (lol)...
But having written short stories before, and a few stage plays, I really should do this next year. If I might ask -- how much time per day (on average) did you have to allot?
Congrats! I failed at NaNoWriMo, but maybe I'll try the script writing one in April.
Rob -
You should definitely do it. It was a lot more fun than I thought.
As for time per day, that's tough to estimate. I got to 20k in the first 10 days, but then I didn't get to 30k until right before Thanksgiving -- it's not like 2012 and New Moon were going to watch themselves, you know -- then found myself in a mad scramble the last weekend. I think Sunday I was at the computer for more than six hours.
You have to average just under 1700 words per day, which is pretty easy. Maybe two pages of text in Microsoft Word with normal settings? If you can carve out 60-90 minutes per day on average, I think you're in good shape.
Yeah, that doesn't sound too bad. One spring break in college I wrote four pages every night for two weeks*, after which I had a 64-page sci-fi story.
I remember most days that I would be looking forward to the night when I would pop on some tunes and just write for an hour or two.
* - Yeah, we had two weeks for spring break and all I did was go home and write! My true nerd colors are showing!
Congrats! I'm sure you can borrow words from my unfinished project and have... ocelots in spaaaaace!
Maybe I'll have a successful NaNoWriMo when I'm not in grad school :-P
Do successful authors get wealth, prestige, and a harem?
"Do successful authors get wealth, prestige, and a harem?"
I sure hope so, Nicole. I'm counting on it. Heck, I'll take two out of three... ONE out of three...
Maybe just a firm handshake from someone respectable next year at SkepTrack...
To paraphrase the drummer from Spinal Tap, "as long as there are wealth and harems, I can do without the prestige."
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