Rules

After an epic writing failure yesterday (I squeezed out a painful 500 words, ugh), I need to average a cool 2000 words a day to meet my 50,000 end goal.

On October 31st (the day before NaNoWriMo began), I laid down some ground rules for myself:

1. Write, don't type. Typing makes it too easy to overuse my delete button, which means I write pages worth of content and end up with a few over-edited, awkward paragraphs. And it also makes surfing the internet waaay to easy. I had to scrap this rule pretty early on in the process. I filled up about 20 pages in my notebook then spent about an hour typing it up. Every hour is precious at this point, so it's back to Microsoft Word.
2. Don't apologize for what I write. I tend to be a self-conscious writer. Let's just admit, for a first time fiction writer, most of this book will be crap. Just keep writing.
   
3. Don't drink too much coffee. I get over-caffeinated, a little paranoid, pee a lot, then fall asleep. Let's avoid that.
   
4. Pace myself. For the love of God I need to crank out 2,000 words a night, minimum. So I'm not going to sleep each night until I reach that goal. Tonight's bedtime isn't looking good.

Aaaand my crazy writing session starts now and continues all night. Allowed breaks: season finale of Mad Men (then no more tv all month!); dinner.

Den out.

NEW MUSIC: The Wildness of Manitoba

Has anyone ever noticed the amazingness to come out of Canada recently? There's Rural Alberta Advantage, of Montreal, and now: The Wilderness of Manitoba... which is evidently in Ontario. I think I need to find a course in geography before I leave this place so that I can actually pretend to understand where places are in the world...

Their music sounds like the Low Anthem, full of great vocal harmonies and banjo and down home, American-sounding folk with a Canadian twist. Check out the two songs below.

MP3: Wilderness of Manitoba - Crow's Feet

MP3: Wilderness of Manitoba - Evening

I'll post more musically inclined inspiration as the month goes on to keep Den on track. But that's all for now...

Ban, out.

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriWhat?

NaNoWriMo is national novel writing month. It's pretty self-explanatory, you try to write a whole novel (defined as 50,000 words) within one month.

Yes, I'm trying to do it (just finishing will be challenging, let alone trying to work around a 40 hour work week, but that's why they call it a challenge right?).

I'm doing it for a couple of reasons:

1) Since Colgate I've been feeling this creative black hole in my life.

2) The resulting novel will probably be crap, but the experience will be good. I've always wanted to write and practice makes perfect so maybe I'll come out of this thing with a more natural ability to write fiction (that's my hope anyways).

3) I've had this really cool plot idea for a couple months now that I can't get out of my head. Actually, it's more like three plot ideas. So I'm making a go of it, lumping two of those ideas together, and seeing if those two lumps will join together into one superawesome lump of a novel.

Why am I blogging about this, you may ask?

I'm doing it for a couple of reasons:

1) One of the motivation techniques the NaNoWriMoers recommend is telling everyone you know that you are writing a novel within a month. That way, if you start second guessing yourself or think about quitting halfway through, you then have to explain to all those people that you're a failure at novel writing. Granted, I don't think anyone reads this blog anymore after Ban and I FAILED at updating it. Could you comment if you still read this so I know who's still around?

2) If I can't think of anything else to write during a writing session, I decided to write a little blip in this blog (a blog blip!). That way I'm still at least writing.

So here's where I stand right now: 2,600 words (about 1/25th of the way there). I should be near 10,000 words right now, so I'm REALLY behind schedule. But I got sick earlier this week which put me out of commission for two days.

That's it for now. I'm a-gonna write like crazy. Daily updates to come about my process, the plot (as I figure it out), and the writing rules I created for myself.

Here's the website if you're curious: www.nanowrimo.org

PS. Sorry Ban, I changed the blog color scheme because it was hurting my eyes. The colors are still a little weird...

Den out.