NaNo Prepping

What? Mygirlfriend wrote a blog post? Holy crap, I better I write one now because I don't want to look like a slacker.

NaNoWriMo is almost upon us once again, and soon I will be starting off strong, writing a few thousand words right out of the gate only to hit a roadblock and figure out where I want to go from there. That's okay though because I have an outline this year and there is no way my story could ever deviate from that…crap, it already did and I haven't started writing yet. Oh well, I'll write another post of absolute gibberish (I'll repost that one day).

In all seriousness, though, I am undertaking the task again. I lost last year due to lack of steam at the end and also the loss of a couple thousand words when I opened Scrivener on another computer before it had properly saved. This year, I'm using OneNote because it is perfectly suited to this task. I am also not going to be a slave to my wordcount (he says…) and I'm just going to get this story out. As I said above, I have an outline (which actually has plenty of flexibility) and I plan on sticking to it. That means that if I get stuck on one part, I can move to another without worrying much about continuity (What do you mean my character was three years older six months ago? Oh, it must have been a time machine accident between chapters. Wait, I'm not writing about a time machine.)

Anyway, if you'd like to participate in NaNoWriMo and write 50,000 words in 30 days and be like the other sadistic fools who take on this venture, visit https://nanowrimo.org for information. It's a lot of fun and you can meet new people.

Trying To Blog Again

I have a lot of things rattling around my head that I need to get out. Primarily because NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us and I need to get writing again. I have an idea for a project this year and it could be really good, but that's not for me to decide. I do have one thing to take care of…the comments.

You, dear reader, do not see all the comments that I get. I have a ton of spam that has nothing to do with the content. They are so general that the bot that posts them posts them everywhere. Here's an example…

 

This comment was left on an SGMR Industries, Inc. post which are sarcastic, humorous, and not to be taken seriously. There are plenty more like that.

Some of the comments left are spam for Adwords or SEO.

All of the poster names are Anonymous and many are just nonsense that don't fit the context of some of my posts.

I have decided that instead of dealing with these comments, I am disabling comments. If you want to comment, please do so on Facebook or Twitter. I will keep past legitimate comments, but from here on out, comments are closed.

My NaNo 2018 Plans

NaNoWriMo is still off in the future a few months. Currently it's in the mid-90s and it's the 4th of July. However, I've been thinking a lot about this year's project which is in the advanced planning stages. I've thought about how I'm going to undertake the challenge this year and have decided to shake things up a bit.

While the spirit of the month is quantity over quality (50,000 words in 30 days), I have decided that I'm not going to incessantly pore over my word count. My plan is to check it and update it once a week, and maybe a couple times in the last week for verification.

I will not be writing in Scrivener, but in OneNote, which what I've taken to doing since it's readily synced up with all of my computing devices (I'm writing this in OneNote on my phone, for example). Don’t get me wrong, Scrivener is possibly the best novel-writing software on the market, but I want to switch things up this year.

I will write every day, but some days may be more productive than others. I’ve found that forcing myself to write at least 1,667 words per day makes me less productive overall. I have a tendency to want to keep going forward on my story idea rather forward on word count. That is, I don’t like to go back to an earlier point in the story and start writing from there again. I tend to want to pick up from the last events that I wrote, whether they’re good or not. I will be thinking more about the story this year since I am more productive when I have fresh ideas in my head.

I seem jump way out ahead of daily goals in the first week and then slow down after that. That’s because the idea is fresh and there are infinitely many directions I could go with the story, but that quickly narrows down to only a few directions and I rarely, if ever, choose wisely. Thinking about this, I could write a Choose Your Own Adventure style of story this year and keep going back to the beginning. Or, I could start writing thirty different stories, that way I get the day one momentum every day of November.