Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related NaNoWriMo –One Week away!!!!

Hey Lara, how do you REALLY feel about NaNo?

I, for one, am scared to death! Yes, I meet deadlines for a living, but this is BIG. Like ... big. I hate self-imposed deadlines because I'm my harshest critic, and I am all panicky I won't meet the deadlines I will have to set for myself to meet the actual deadline because I will be spending four days in VEGAS toward the end of the month. WOO!

However, I do have my plot ready, and I am stoked about that.

Jenn, if you shoot for 2000 words per day instead of 1667, then you can take 4 days off at the end of the month and still have your 50,000 words.

Here is week two from 2006. I suggest you guys read these for encouragement during the month of November.


Dear NaNoWriMo Participant,

Hi there! It's Chris Baty again. And if you accepted the challenge in last week's email, you opened a comfortable word-count lead right out of the gate, increased that lead in the first weekend, and are now sailing far ahead of pace, preparing to plunge into the 20,000s.

You are looking good, feeling great, and your back is slowly accumulating an array of "kick me" signs, placed there by your fellow participants as you sprinted past us. A few signs, though, are a small price to pay for victory. And you *are* going to be victorious. If you are a day or less from 20K, you have everything it takes to win, and win big. Keep it up. Don't slow down. We admire you, even if you made us feel so bad about ourselves that we had to put those signs on you.

But this email is not for those doing exceptionally well. It's for the rest of us---authors with underdeveloped word counts, overdeveloped novel-guilt complexes, and sensational procrastinating abilities. Because we are the ones who are going to begin having serious misgivings about this whole escapade in the next seven days.

Why?

Because it turns out we are too busy to do this.

Or because a crisis has brought some novel-eating turmoil into our lives.

Or because our stories are really, really bad, and we're wondering why we're sacrificing so much of our time to produce a consistently crappy book.

It all adds up to the fabled Week Two Wall---a low-point of energy, enthusiasm, and joie de novel that strikes most NaNoWriMo participants between days 7 and 14. This is when our inner editors, who largely turned a blind eye to our novel flailings in Week One, return to see how things are going. And their assessments are never kind.

The plot is draggy. The characters are boring. The dialogue is pointless, and the prose has all the panache of something dashed off by a distracted kindergartner.

If you're feeling any of these things---or find yourself starting to feel them this week---know that nothing is wrong. In fact, you're likely on track for a great NaNoWriMo. Just lower your head, pick up your pace, and write straight into the maw of your misgivings. If you are thinking about quitting, DO NOT DO IT IN WEEK TWO.

If you have to quit, do it in Week Three.

I'm serious.

Because if you quit in Week Two, you're going to miss an amazing moment---the moment when your novel begins to click. You'll miss a genius plot twist you can't foresee right now that will suddenly elevate your book from a distressing mess to a sort-of-tolerable mess. And then you'll miss the euphoric breakthrough that follows that twist, when your book improves itself all the way to not-half-bad.

Not-half-bad will make you scream, it feels so good.

And you know what? The more you write, the better it gets. So make it a priority to write in torrents this week. Allow your characters to change, and have change forced upon them. Follow your intuition, even if it leads away from where you thought your book was heading. And know that writing a novel is like building a car. Your only job this month is to create a clunky machine that will eventually move people from one place to another. If your beast rolls at all at this point, you're doing great. Pretty prose, snappy dialogue, brilliant metaphors---they're all part of the high-gloss paint job and finishing touches we put on *after* the body is built.

In December, we'll have nothing but time for adding flames to our hoods and airbrushing a majestic eagle or pair of sunrise stallions on the sides of our new rides. For now, the 20,000s are calling, and we can't get distracted by the small stuff if we're going to get there. In the challenging confines of Week Two, our books will truly be built. Characters will evolve. Plots will unfold. It's going to be difficult at times, but once we make it into (and out of) the 20,000s, everything gets much easier. And envious tales of our literary feat-in-the-making will begin circulating amongst our friends, family, and co-workers.

At which point, we'll probably find a note or two on our backs as well.

It'll be awesome.

Keep plowing onward, brave writer! Good things are coming. I'll be back next Wednesday for some thoughts on Week Three.

Dreaming about my airbrushed eagle,

Chris
NaNoWriMo
8400 words and counting

Almost time guys!! Here is Chris latest post on the website:


One week remaining until writing commences! It's been inspiring to see so many folks roughing out ideas and characters with each other in the forums.

For me, one-week-out tends to be the magical window when I begin receiving a wealth of half-baked ideas from my imagination, all of which it fervently pitches as the centerpiece for that year's novel. Most of these tend to be barely altered versions of real-life stories that people tell me that week, or news headlines or advertisements I misread.

This morning, I saw the following headline on Yahoo news: "Seven orcas missing from Puget Sound, researchers say"

Being half-awake, I misread it as: "Seven orcs missing from Puget Sound, researchers say"

At which point my imagination galloped over. "Hey!" it said, excitedly rubbing its little hands together. "Check this plot out! What if there were some sort of floating orc pen off the coast of Washington State? And over years of seaborn captivity, these grumpy orcs had become passably good swimmers, had developed a taste for kelp, and had renounced their slaughtering, pillaging ways to become friendly tourist attractions, complete with hoop-jumps and show-stopping finales where they leapt out of the water to nimbly pluck a mackerel from the mouth of their trainers? All is going well, until one day seven of them simply disappear? Yeah? And, over on the mainland, some very strange things start happening. Boom! What do you think? Pure gold, right?"

Trying not to offend, I'll grab the little notebook that I keep close at hand in October and November, and jot down something like "orcs escape mackerel sound," a note so cryptic that I'm guaranteed to read it a few days later and have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

Still, when you amass enough of those, eventually something sticks. My tip: Get your own wee notebook if you don't already have one, and keep it and a pen handy these next couple days. Go on walks. Take long showers. Good ideas come at the strangest times, and I have a feeling some humdingers will be coming your way soon.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone. We'll be posting a new WrimoRadio on Monday.

Chris
NaNoWriMo

I'm excited about this. Of course the muse keeps changing her mind about what fic I'm going to write and won't get OTOH done before next week.

Still exciting though! Of course, we're going to KC for 3 days, plus Thanksgiving means I'll lose a couple of days but I plan on spending no time whatsoever in the hospital this year...

Carol

I'm in!

I have this bad habit of being spontaneous, so of course I'd wait until the last minute to decide to join in on the fun. I've been doing a lot of reading and realized that I'm tired of reading, it's about time I wrote my own novel. I've only been seriously thinking about it since January.

So here I go. I'm going to go completely crazy, I'm sure, but it sure does sound like fun. And just maybe I can teach myself some discipline when it comes to writing.

I'm pretty excited, actually. Here's hoping that we all reach 50,000!

I had my plot all lined out and now I don't remember what my subject was. I'm hoping James does...


Elisabeth

I remembered my subject all on my own, but now I'm in a conundrum. I got a second idea that is equally as appealing as the first one. I wonder what the criteria should be for deciding which one gets written.


Elisabeth
PS If you would like to weigh in I am accepting 2 cent donations. Let me know and I'll e-mail you or PM you with my two vastly different ideas.