Countdown to NaNo

In the flurry of getting extra posts and chapters written for November, this blog has been sadly neglected. So,to make up for this, I've decided to keep track of my NaNo progress here.

I can't promise I'll post every day, it will be NaNo after all, but I'll have my little word count widget up here. I might even post the occassional excerpt. :-)

I've been reading a lot of interesting posts by some of my fellow Blogging NaNoers, I'm impressed by the amount of preparation some people are doing. A lot of them have character sketches, detailed plot outlines, maps . . .

The first year I did NaNo my outline was more like a list of everything I wanted to have happen in my novel. At the time it worked for me because this way if I got stuck in the scene I was writing I could jump ahead (or back) as the spirit moved me.

I ran into two problems with this method. First, I ran out of story before I ran out of words, and second, it turned into an editing nightmare. The basic story is still good and I still have faith in it, but it needs a lot of work still.

Last year I almost didn't do NaNo. Even though I was off work (or maybe because I was off work) my writing wasn't going well at all. I thought about NaNo but for two weeks prior to it I didn't even write so much as a journal entry. I decided that maybe I'd better give NaNo a pass.

However, though I wasn't writing that didn't stop me from thinking. I had a story that was stuck in my head, but every time I tried to write it down it nothing happened. It was so frustrating! This wonderful story was just sitting there, complete from start to finish. And then November first came, and so did my story.

I kept track of my daily word count using a paper and pen. I confess I did far more procrastinating than actual writing, but the writing did come (mostly very late at night). I reached 50,000 words three days before the end of November and my novel finished around 60,000 words.

So, this year I have a title, I have a cover, and I have a vague idea of the plot. At least I know how the story starts (sort of) and how it ends (maybe) and some of what goes on in between. Let's see if I can make the 2009 NaNo a repeat of 2008.