I WON NANOWRIMO 2015!
*does a little dance of winner-ness*
Caveats: My word count turned out to be a bit off, thanks to how Scrivener compiles chapter headers and synopses, so I had to sprint-write an extra couple hundred words after I assumed I was already done. BUT I'm done with NaNo...
But not done with the book. And it's shaping up to be a doozy. It started off as a romance, but turned into alt-history fantasy and then I gave all the typical male hero parts to the gay BFF and sent the hero off for the majority of the story so far, so the romance is going to be a long slow burn. (Gay BFF has a crush on the hero, whee. I'll probably give him his own romance later.)
Anyway Lavinia has a lot of other things to occupy her with while her erstwhile husband is off running amok through the front lines.
Plans going forward: Snakes and Ladders is still priority now that NaNo is done with. I'm going to maintain a goal of 750 words a day on that, but give one day a week to Lavinia and Crew so they can stay fresh. (This works out to five days a week on Snakes and one day on Ash and one night for crits.)
I HAVE to halve my word counts because as John can tell you, ain't nothing else in my life happening this month. And life has got to get back on track. My house is a mess. My laundry pile is huge. I haven't cooked food in weeks, besides microwaving and ordering in, which don't count.
Lessons learned: I can't get caught up in editing too much. Perfection paralysis is my enemy. Just sitting down and shitting out a draft is half the battle. Word counts and goals are my friends. Having a weekly goal or a monthly goal I have to hit has been key to consistency.
The whole month has been a vaguely overwhelming and slightly terrifying experience punctuated by a lot of fun, squeals of joy, and gleeful evil chuckles. The terrifying and overwhelming parts came from being certain every day that I was on the verge of running out of ideas and stalling out, and the glee came from sitting down and finding unforeseen connections, fun wordplay, and terrible things to do to Lavinia.
(People you do not want to be: Lavinia. Last I left her she was cleaning up dragon poop and mangled dead dragon. That is about the LEAST traumatic thing to happen to her in this book.)
///
I've been having fun NaNoing up my war story, but my character is starting to wander into the thorny lands of "do I want to contribute to the war machine?" and "Do I have a choice about this?" It's basically a long extension of the idea that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but reversing that....ie...when you are at war, everybody looks like a soldier, and how do you stop being a soldier.
Caveats: My word count turned out to be a bit off, thanks to how Scrivener compiles chapter headers and synopses, so I had to sprint-write an extra couple hundred words after I assumed I was already done. BUT I'm done with NaNo...
But not done with the book. And it's shaping up to be a doozy. It started off as a romance, but turned into alt-history fantasy and then I gave all the typical male hero parts to the gay BFF and sent the hero off for the majority of the story so far, so the romance is going to be a long slow burn. (Gay BFF has a crush on the hero, whee. I'll probably give him his own romance later.)
Anyway Lavinia has a lot of other things to occupy her with while her erstwhile husband is off running amok through the front lines.
Plans going forward: Snakes and Ladders is still priority now that NaNo is done with. I'm going to maintain a goal of 750 words a day on that, but give one day a week to Lavinia and Crew so they can stay fresh. (This works out to five days a week on Snakes and one day on Ash and one night for crits.)
I HAVE to halve my word counts because as John can tell you, ain't nothing else in my life happening this month. And life has got to get back on track. My house is a mess. My laundry pile is huge. I haven't cooked food in weeks, besides microwaving and ordering in, which don't count.
Lessons learned: I can't get caught up in editing too much. Perfection paralysis is my enemy. Just sitting down and shitting out a draft is half the battle. Word counts and goals are my friends. Having a weekly goal or a monthly goal I have to hit has been key to consistency.
The whole month has been a vaguely overwhelming and slightly terrifying experience punctuated by a lot of fun, squeals of joy, and gleeful evil chuckles. The terrifying and overwhelming parts came from being certain every day that I was on the verge of running out of ideas and stalling out, and the glee came from sitting down and finding unforeseen connections, fun wordplay, and terrible things to do to Lavinia.
(People you do not want to be: Lavinia. Last I left her she was cleaning up dragon poop and mangled dead dragon. That is about the LEAST traumatic thing to happen to her in this book.)
///
I've been having fun NaNoing up my war story, but my character is starting to wander into the thorny lands of "do I want to contribute to the war machine?" and "Do I have a choice about this?" It's basically a long extension of the idea that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but reversing that....ie...when you are at war, everybody looks like a soldier, and how do you stop being a soldier.