I can’t dedicate the million hours NaNoWriMo requires this year. It’s a great book – I’m sorry none of you will get to spend quality time with Dagmar.
Tag: nanowrimo
NaNoWriMo 2009
7000 words in, I finally have a plot. Or at least a purpose. And characters. The full plot will probably not reveal itself until the end of the month, meaning I’ll have a lot more work to do to get it into a finished state. Which, based on history, I will never do. I’m writing about my kid, his friend, and his cousins. It is fiction, I swear. My niece does not own a store that only sells cups and saucers. She’s 9 – owning a store like that is years in her future.
I don’t know why I keep doing NaNoWriMo, but I’m at the point where I almost have to do it, or I’ll feel bad about it. So I give up a few hours of my November, no big deal, right?
So while I’m working on this, please send snacks.
Stupid Adventures in Nano-ing
My novel sucks. But it usually does. I went off on a long ramble in an attempt to hit 10k words this morning. I need to write 4k this morning to be back where I’m supposed to be by now. “Supposed to be” is relative, of course. I’m sure if I focused I could actually be close to done. I just get easily distracted by shiny objects, like the “Watch Instantly” feature on Netflix that was finally released to beta for Macintosh. I may never leave my comfy chair again.
Here’s the excerpt for you. Not criticism is allowed, the whole point is to write, not to write well.
I flipped open my phone to read the text message. I have to do that because of the model phone I have. It is so funny, if this were 10 years ago, I would be so mady in love with this phone, and the simple act of flipping it open would give me thrill like no other because it is so futuristic and I could pretend I am James T. Kirk. Not that I wouldn’t do that even if I did not have a flip phone that looks a bit like a tri-corder. I want to state for the record that I am not a science fiction geek, but I am a television geek and while the two may seem very similar they are very different. The only reason I think having a tri-corder phone is cool is because it was on a famous television show. Actually, I would probably be just as excited to have the telephone on the wall from Lassie or the one at the top of the telephone pole from Green Acres. Okay, the last part might be a little bit of a stretch. While I am a huge Green Acres fan, the thought of having to climb up to the top of a telephone pole to answer the phone or make a call is a little daunting to me. Daunting might not even be the right word, but after a while, I’m pretty sure I would balance an old-fashioned answering machine up on the top of the pole and never answer the phone again. That’s another thing. In today’s world of phone company voice mail, there is no way in hell I could ever get to the top of a telephone pole to answer the phone before it went to voice mail.
The Gods Try to Thwart My Efforts
Netflix streaming for Macs was released as a beta. I am doomed. I will never finish my Nano Novel now. Curse you, Netflix!
The first movie I tested was “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” I believe that movie has the longest opening credit sequence in the history of movies. Five minutes of animated credits. Junior thought I was watching a cartoon. I watched 10 minutes before realizing that I shouldn’t be watching a movie until I finish my NaNoWriMo word count for the day. Bad Jody!
NaNoWriMo 2008 – Day One
This is my 7th or 8th year of doing NaNoWriMo, and every year I go into it with a slightly different attitude. This year I was looking forward to it for the past two weeks (of course – when I wasn’t allowed to type a word) but this morning there was very little if any excitement. And I had things that needed to be done today that did not allow me to sit and write, including spending 5, yes 5, hours at the baseball field while my son played his game AND the one that followed, because they didn’t have enough kids. He was psyched because the 2nd game was far more laid back and he got to try catching for the first time. He caught for two innings – the first and the last, and definitely did better the 2nd time. Maybe it won’t be a bad thing for him to try to pick up, although personally, I would never want to be a catcher. Way way way too much pressure. That kind of stuff doesn’t seem to bother him, though.
So anyway, I hit the minimum word could for today (the words I’m typing here don’t count. D’oh!) which is good, but really, I should have been able to do much better. The first day of Nano you should be like a crazed monkey, just typing until you pass out, especially if the first day of Nano is on a weekend. I feel like I did not take advantage of the free gift of November 1st falling on a Saturday. Oh well, too late to do much about it.
For the record, the first few pages of the novel are kind of a young adult thing, because I realized that my son and his friend are going to want to see what I’ve done with the names we all came up with for my characters. I don’t know if I’ll be able to carry this through 30 days, and there are no clear plot ideas yet (unfortunately for me, I actually try to NOT think about my Nano novel prior to November 1st because that feels like cheating. But that means I don’t have any idea what the hell I’m writing about for the first couple of days. We’ll have to see how that goes.