linsec.ca blog » NaNoWriMo

Time to catch up

vdanen — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:55:07 +0000

I’m in crunch mode right now… wrote 2400 words today, another 4300 to get back on target (need to write 1167 words per day to make the 50k target at the end of the month).

Not an excuse, really, but this was a stupid work week with stupid little things going on that totally distracted me and by the time I had some downtime, trying to be creative and imaginative were the last things I wanted (vegetative state, here I come!)

Anyways, aside from having to fix some electrical issues (lose wires in breaker box are _not_ a good thing as my melted wires will attest to!), I’ve been able to write more today than anytime this week. And since there’s nothing decent on tonight, I hope to crank out those 4300 words tonight and then I can be sane and try to keep up.

Oh, for anyone interested in seeing some stats, my profile page on nanowrimo.org has my word counts as I update them.

NaNoWriMo: take two

vdanen — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:28:49 +0000

So last year I participated in National Novel Writing Month but didn’t pull it off. The idea is to go nuts and write a 50k word novel during the month of November. People all around the world do it, and it’s quite fun but very time consuming and pretty crazy. Last year there was too much going on for me to really focus, so I think I hit about 20k words. Not quite an epic fail, but not nearly what I had set out for.

This year I’m at it again. I’ve got some vague ideas as to what to write about and it should be fun. I’m definitely aiming for 50k words this month so stuff like blogging and other “extra-curicular” activities will be on hold this month while I churn out a novel (or something vaguely resembling one).

Wish me luck!

NaNoWriMo is a go this year!

vdanen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:22:12 +0000

Well, actually, I just found about it this week. The NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is “contest” to encourage people to write a novel. The goal is to write 50k words in one month.. from scratch, starting at 00:01 on Nov 1st with the deadline being 23:59 on Nov 30th.

So I’m going to do it. I’ve been wanting to get back into writing speculative fiction for a few years now but work, wife, kid, Xbox, etc. have all gotten in the way. =) Very few people know this about me, but back when I was in highschool I started a fantasy trilogy and wrote 2.5 books in it. I never did finish it. I picked up reading it a few months ago and now I think those rejection letters of the happily-optimistic-16-year-old were well justified. =) It’s not that the writing was awful but dang it… I had enough ideas crammed in there for 20 books and the writing style wasn’t the greatest (at least not to begin with but, then again, I started it when I was in grade 9 (so, what, 14 years old?). The stuff near the end when I was 18 was much much better.

At any rate, I have no idea what I’m going to write about other than that it will be fantasy-ish (but I don’t like using the term fantasy because that gives ideas of Tolkien and unicorns and furry hobbits, etc. — what I have rattling around in my skulll is more like mythology than fantasy). Should be interesting. No idea what, if anything, will happen with it come the end of November but maybe it’ll get these creative juices flowing again. If nothing else, it’ll be fun to try and write something that isn’t “technical” in nature. =)