NaNoWriMo 2013
Things I learned:
1. You really can do it.
2. I tend to write 500-600 words at a time when I'm going for wordcount, but 1,000+ is actually pretty doable when I know where I am going.
3. If you've got something you're excited about, you might find yourself waking up at 4 or 5 am to get cracking. You can squeeze it in at lunch, you can keep a notebook and scribble at the bus stop, you can write while you eat.
4. Neo2's are really great. This would not have been possible without the one I got. They were discontinued September 2013 but there are probably tons of stock that schools don't need anymore now that everyone is switching over to tablets.
Its name is Scacchi and it is pretty bad and I don't even care. I dropped characters and subplots faster than flaming hot potatoes, although I am managing to keep the two main ones in there. I wrote a pretty good action scene, I had one of those mind-of-their-own characters and he turned out developing pretty well (he kind of came out of nowhere), and I'm pretty satisfied with the nerdrush fantasy-science. It's supposed to be fantasy but there's pretty much no magic in it. I just kept not squeezing it in, I was concentrating on the mystery part of it so much. This was my first time doing NaNo and I'm feeling pretty good about setting these goals and finishing them.
It's not finished, though hahaha. I will wrap it up in December.
This was also my first time writing in first person. I always choose third-person omniscient, so it was a little tough putting in the descriptions that I would normally like to do. It was very clunky the way I was doing it, like March just stopped talking for an hour or two. I ended up relying more on dialogue to get that stuff across, which was all right because I tend not to use dialogue very much in third-person mode. Also, I was a little sad that I didn't get to follow some of the other characters around because March literally HAD to be there with them, but I think I'll stick with first person. It was just a ton of new things this time around.
So, I'm at 51,326 right now. Probably if I went all the way to the end, then went back and filled in all the things I left hanging because I wanted to get to the next, more interesting section, and fixed all the long, dragged out things where I was trying to explain three paranoid assumptions March was making in a way that was not an infodump, it'll end up to be around 70,000. Looking forward to it :)