Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. -- Gene Fowler

Thursday, November 4, 2010

NaNoWriMo update

A quick update before I head off to lunch:

NaNoWriMo is going pretty well for me so far. I'm a bit ahead in word count and my story is slowly beginning to shake out. I'm focusing on things I hadn't expected to, but it'll all tie together in the end.

Before the week is out I'll need to spend some time outlining the direction of the story. I'll probably pick up some index cards and scrawl out scene ideas on them. It's easier to organise them when they're on index cards. You can move them around and write on them or pin them up on a corkboard or whatever.

One of the keys to my success thus far has been word sprints. Either on my own or with a group on the Internet, I spend ten or fifteen minutes at a go writing my little fingers off. I'm averaging over four hundred words in a fifteen minute stretch, I think, so a handful of those is enough to satisfy my quota for the day.

If you're NaNo-ing, don't forget to take periodic brief breaks. Sprints help with that. Fifteen minutes on, five minutes off, for example. Get up. Walk around. Pet the cat. Get the mail. Pester Visit a co-worker. Take your mind off the story and your body out of the chair for a bit. Then get back to it.

Later I'll put up a word count gadget so you can follow my progress. That is if the NaNo site is behaving and if I can find somewhere to put it on the blog page! This place is getting a bit crowded. After NaNo I may consider a new template. Ah, a concern for later.

Hope all you Nano-ers out there are kicking your word counts down the stairs with steel-tipped boots!

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