NaNoWriMo 2008

Not that I'm so eager as to start the thread two months early or anything.

Might take a break this time around. We'll see.

You've earnt it, you've banked up approx. 12 million extra words over the years.

I have an idea this year - a man who disappears and then mysteriously returns, claiming to be his own son - as he is a time traveller.

i am in again. god help me.

No idea yet. Thinking though. I've got a list of disused ideas somewhere.

maybe this will be the year i get past page two.

I'm thinking about it, though I reckon the write a play in a month thing next spring might be more my thing.

thing used twice in one sentence - me am write good.

I might try this NaNoWriMo!

Due to nursing school, I'm out this year. But I will cheerlead the rest of you! (No promises on whether I'm getting the pom poms out.)

yeah, I just registered for this a couple days ago. couldn't go back to school this fall, so I've got a lot of free time, and I figure this might be the year I pull it off.

I don't have even the faintest whiff of an idea yet, though.

Hoho, I'm not even gonna PRETEND I'm trying this year! My first attempt, last year, yielded ~1k words split into 32 chapters. (I figured writing really short chapters would motivate me, but damn if I can't come up with a story that lasts longer than one page. Maybe if they had NaNoProPo, where you wrote a prose poem every day – that I could get into.)

Sample of one of the longer chapters:

CHAPTER 4: MANGO CURRICULUM VITAE

The mango had grown up at the other side of the island. The tree from which it had grown was healthy and inspired by the warm, salty breezes and lackadaisical island culture. It started out a bold, splendid blossom favored by insects above all others on it tree, bees hovering to touch its stamen and bathe in its golden pollen. Soon it grew into a hard green fruit, swelling with promise and juice as it expanded every day. The sun warmed it from yellow, to orange, to a fiery gradient of the above framed in glorious crimson.
It was friendly and encouraging to its mates on the other branches, spinning yarns of their future sweet, firm flesh and with what pride they would represent the mango population.
The mango went to school and learned all the basic stuff, like proper sentence structure and math and being a good citizen. It wasn't that exotic. The mango's resumé was short. Simply not that much education was available to the fruit.

CHAPTER SIX: WE ARE SO GRATEFUL FOR ALL OUR MANY BLESSINGS

Mangoes don't have appendixes.

CHAPTER EIGHT: MORE VAIN HINTING AT ORIGIN STORY

I think we'll save that for a later chapter.

Longest chapter BY FAR:

CHAPTER NINE: UNFEASIBLE TOIL

Mines! I've been working at the fork and glue mine since my skull joints ain't been fused. I push a cart full of those tiny empty Elmer's glue cartons with the lids unscrewed, and a service holding container for the average kitchen drawer, and hope the glue and forks drip into the proper container. If not, I gotta separate them out and get glue all over me and my hands. The common punishment for the idle, the insubordinate, or the malingerers is to be forced to stand naked, under the ooze of adhesive and silverware, "forked and glued." Then sometimes dipped in pigeon feathers and guano. It ain't happened to me, and shan't as long as I ain't framed. I am not a malingerer.
Mines! I'd give them the shaft if I could. I hate mines and I reckon I'll hate mines as long as the coxswain is vexed by the cat staring at the sausage beneath the table. I'll hate mines as long as the moon keeps waking and waning, when I finally am good enough to bow; without bumpers in the gutter, when sic even more severe levels of burns are discovered, when cats get tired of catnip, when a wild burro falls in love with a domesticated monkey, when a furlong equals a hectare, when the devil's tears turn into chocolate apostrophes, when my itches are healed by the sun's golden rays, when I can gorgonize a man by giving him the double deuce (this being a two-handed, bilaterally symmetrical employment of the bird or lone middle finger (the mango shudders (a pair of nude pantyhose fall off a drying line, looking to all the world like a snake's abandoned sheath of shucked skin), it shudders again (the hand falls off a statue of Philo T. Farnsworth in Rigby, Idaho), the mango refrains from its chilled shudders), once again, when a man shall foreswear the savor of salt, when a sock shall remain clean and dry after 80 consecutive hours of wear, when the rhino lays down with the anti-rhino, then shall my peace with mines be made.
But that'll be a long time from now.
My name is Errol Reed Gilbert, and I endorse this message.

Oh man why did I ever try.

Due to nursing school, I'm out this year. But I will cheerlead the rest of you! (No promises on whether I'm getting the pom poms out.)

-- Sara R-C, Thursday, August 28, 2008 10:01 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

are you at the U? maybe we'll run into each other!

are you allowed to outline your novel ahead of time?

"allowed"

I imagine like how they can't STOP you from mentally counting cards in Vegas, they can't STOP you from fleshing out some sort of internal outline (at the very least).

Anyone want my copy of No Plot, No Preoblem? I will mail it to anyone who wants it. It depressed me, but, NB: I am a depressio.

No Spellcheck, No Probelum

OK, so I've checked out that book with the "Search Inside!" feature on Amazon, and basically the centre premise is that to write a novel in a month you need a deadline, right? I've never written a novel, but from my experiences with NaSoAlMo (National Solo Album Month), I know that deadlines don't really motivate me, much as I want them to!
Anyway, I will now quote Douglas Adams: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - there's a great bit in the intro to one of his novels where he talks about his working process and how it involves eating toast, drinking coffee, taking walks, having baths, and not actually doing much writing.

haha awesome

I liked Ray Bradbury's suggestion that your first 1k pages of writing are shit, and once you get those out of the way, you'll be a good writer.

srsly snoball if you are interested, I will mail it to you!

No, that's alright, thanks anyway. I once tried writing a novel, but it was crap. I was attempting to write a William S Burroughs style cut up novel whilst simultaneously following the writing advice of Ian Fleming. Actually some of Fleming's advice was pretty good, particularly the bit about not looking back at what you've already written until the novel's complete.
http://www.jamesbondwiki.com/page/Ian+Fleming's+Essays?t=anon
Anyway this year I'm doing NaSoAlMo again - is anyone else? Last year's thread sort of fell by the wayside.

Abbott I'll take yr book!

(although I don't know how helpful it will be, since I was also sort of planning on the NaNoProPo approach)

Abbott, an encouraging snip from the nanowrimo faq:

Outlines and plot notes are very much encouraged, and can be started months ahead of the actual novel-writing adventure. Previously written prose, though, is punishable by death.

I'm in.

MANGO CURRICULUM VITAE

Abbott can we exchange writing sometime

I'm trying to decide if I should use my idea about a guy who gets a vasectomy after surreptitiously freezing a sample of his sperm, which he then uses to impregnate his wife and sue the doctor for malpractice; or my idea about two german brothers who are both writers and share a bitter rivalry until one of them dies and leaves behind a will consisting of nearly a thousand handwritten pages of impenetrably dense, rambling prose punctuated by occasional moments of clarity.

Well, I'm finally in this year.

A story of black metal and the quavering fools it conquers.

You know, I have a few ideas, and one of them doesn't not have to do with metal.

Haw.

Suss that one out!!!!

Knoxville Kreator Kombo

I'm in.

Dueds ben-rad sow-ny

send me yr address

to

igotabeefpastry at gmail dot khaaannnnn

email: sent!
thanks: given! (repeatedly)

inbox: checked!

surely all NaNoWriMo books should be pulpy crap that read like the author was whacked on speed the whole time they were in production?

was also considering this approach, yes

Hopefully without actually taking speed?

there's more than one way to get it done

there is some story about Richard Allen once writing a novel in a week (or was it a weekend?).

Hopefully without actually taking speed?

-- Abbott, Friday, August 29, 2008 3:17 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

will probably just drink lots of caffeine/smoke lots of cigs.

I'm doing nanowrimo! my first time!

I am at 4,100+ as of last night. I am hoping to get to at least 6,000 today.

I'm unemployed at the moment, but there is a definite prospect on the horizon, so my strategy is to sock a lot of words away this week so that i have breathing room later on the month. My partner and dog are away for the week, too, so I have the house to myself. So far, so good - I want at least 20,000 by the end of the week.

3,002 words, and just now managing to stop procrastinating (ahem) and sit down for a session today. I suppose technically I only have to manage 334.

4,397, which means I am behind already. Are other people still going?

trucking along, in fact taking the night off probably

still going here, over 7,200 now. Should be past 8,000 by the end of the day, if not further. for 3 days, that's a good start!

writing at work is proving "tough"

ok so my protagonist shares a full name with the president of the north american baptist association, apparently

OK, I've passed the 10,000 word mark. Not ever going back and reading what I've already written is U&K. Some of the writing is so bad that I'm laughing out loud...

Norman and Hackett got into the lift and ascended upwards.

I sat down on November 1st with a hangover, wrote 400 words, and then got a call asking me if I could fly to Barcelona the next day.

I have not written much since then.

are you ernest hemingway?

the first two words of my story are made-up multisyllabic adverbs so I'm going with no

chalkingly...

fritterably...

he strolled.

Greysuitedly, blankstarefully,

(have now returned home and located half-full bottle of Wild Turkey 101, lighter, smokes; initiating phase 2)

So, how is this going for everyone? I am about two and a half thousand words behind schedule due to an ear infection.

im a couple thousand behind too, due to getting p'ed the f o

I'm the whole month behind due to originally deciding my demanding new position at work required so much focus as to render nanowrimo superfluous, and then last week resigning from that job and frantically looking for the next one.

Good luck on the job hunt. If things don't work out, you could always drown your sorrow in a sea of 50,000 words.

TO DO:
1) get job caretaking out of season hotel in the middle of nowhere
2) move there with wife and kid
3) write novel

1.5) have kid

I'm about 7000 words behind schedule. No problem.

I'm about 2200 words behind. Hang on... (types on knackered old manual typewriter)

All work and no play makes snoball a dull boy.
All work and no play makes snoball a dull boy.
All work and no play makes snoball a dull boy.
All work and no play makes snoball a dull boy.
<snip>
All work and no play makes snoball a dull boy.

Yeah, that ought to do it.

So what happened for everyone else?

I ended up working on another election campaign and got nothing done for about 2 weeks. at the final week i was at 18,000 words, way way behind. But I got onto a pace of about 5,000 words per day and finished the morning of the 29th. hooray! I've got way more to do, so I'll get back to writing through the rest of December, on it goes.

i did about half of it and then started having crises and quit, but then i returned and finished after the dec. 1 mark

editing now

TO DO:
1) get job caretaking out of season hotel in the middle of nowhere
2) move there with wife and kid
3) write novel

― snoball, Monday, November 17, 2008 6:37 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

this is kind of genius

you get the joke right hoos

I'm stuck at about ~35K. I'm planning to get the first draft finished before Christmas.

I finished. You can read my unedited first draft in serial form here: http://inuitbikini.blogspot.com/search/label/Furry%20Folk

Edited some today, and holy lol. I had this as a sentence:

"Here Judith complete dossier on."

WOWOWOWOWOWOW @ writing on 3rd shift

"It was his oatmeal-like qualities that enabled her to find his presence digestible."

lol

that's fukkin great!!

in a sense

deleted with gusto

I'm in HOOS's camp. That "oatmeal-like" quote was a great sentence - unless you were striving for an atmosphere of bejeweled elegance.

Thirded - that oatmeal line is pretty good.
As for "Here Judith complete dossier on", my first draft is full of stuff where I was tired and was bashing in anything.
Example:

The McHendrys sat on the side of the docks, watching as their luxury yacht slowly began to sink beneath the waves. By now, river police had arrived.

^^^ that's supposed to be a third of a chapter, but I was so ZZZZZZZZ at that time of night that I couldn't write any more.

"Here Judith complete dossier on": my only explanation for this is that I had some idea and was using this as a (really quickly typed) placeholder for it, and then never returned to fill it back in. And now I can't remember what it means!

The whole confusing mess was compounded because I had a planning document, and a separate chapter summary document, when clearly they should have been just one single file!

xpost: I assumed it meant "note to self: insert complete dossier on Judith here"?

Yeah, that's kinda what I was trying to explain there. It was just lodged into a paragraph like it was a normal sentence, though!

Anyone else starting up for 2009? Would start a new thread but if it is just me, I won't.

I got about 4,000 words further on my project since last November so I'm just continuing the same thing. This breaks the rule, I know, but oh well. This is for me and only me and it is a successful writing strategy, so here I go again.

I'm having a go for the first time. If I make it halfway I'll call it a rousing success.

A bunch of people in my town got together at a diner tonight so we could all start writing together. I got 2000+ words done and some nice fellow writer picked up my tab. Success!

so far the meets in my region are proving uninspiring. i've always found this kind of a problem tbh, i've only ever met two people i've really gotten along with as a result of nanowrimo

(577 words)

i have like 120 pages of final papers to write in the next 6 weeks so no nanowrimo for me this year. boooooo.

oh shit i thought the first was tomorrow. ok, after dinner i will start.

ok, so we need a new thread!

I just re-read my first draft and it is straight up garbage.

I just re-re-read my first draft and it reads like it was written by someone who'd never even visited Planet Earth nor interacted with a single human being, like, ever.

This project is a crock of shite but I tried it anyway