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NaNoWriMo Day 1

I started my National Novel Writing Month project today and I am happy to report that as of writing this I am over 2,000 words in which exceeds the daily goal they set. I know that I won’t reach the goal every day so the more days I can go over the goal the better.

For a project this year I am writing a novel about my Knights of Reignsborough character Ricochet. Specifically I am doing his origin story and I outlined the novel using the “Save the Cat” method. I wanted to talk a bit about that because I am not usually an outliner. I had three projects I was debating on doing. Each of them are novels that I want to write, but I couldn’t make up my mind. I found by working through the outline it made me think about the story as a whole and not just my concepts for the stories.

For one of them I realized that my science was bad and a lot had changed since I first thought up the concept. The world I created just didn’t work and I needed to spend a lot more time working out how the technology should function, how the political dynamics should work, and basically world build before I could truly tell the story. I had started that novel once before and got 10,000 words into it before I realized I had lost my way. Outlining it helped flesh out the story and while it gave me a path I am not completely happy with that path yet and the flaws are now glaring.

I found that my outline for the Richocet novel was very detailed and realized that I had put more thought into it than the other two concepts. I knew this character already and I had no problem outlining the book. I’m not completely happy with the outline, but I don’t need to be. I can change things as I go. It is just a framework to keep me from getting stuck like I so frequently do.

My third concept is the first book in a series. I have a real desire to write this series but as I look at my work I don’t think I am ready to take that on yet. I want to improve my writing more, research more, and generally take more time. It is not a good project to write in a month if I want it to be hard Sci-Fi. I also have doubts if the series will be sellable. It is about a generation ship and each book would focus on a different generation. I don’t know that new characters for each book is something that would sell or not.

With my project decided I started writing today. I was struck with the desire to go back and edit or to pad things to fit some artificial idea of what a chapter size should be. I had to keep reminding myself that editing and formating comes later. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to just write it and to achieve the goal I need to turn off my inner editor for now. That doesn’t mean I can’t make minor fixes or maybe add a new paragraph later in the month, but if I want to complete it I can’t get into the editing loop.

I really feel like this is my year to complete NaNoWriMo. Please wish me luck.

NaNoWriMo 2020

I have never succeeded at NaNoWriMo. For anyone who does not know there is a website called NaNoWriMo.org that is dedicated to encouraging writers to write a novel in the month of November. They treat it as a contest, provide tools, and a community to help you reach your goal. I have tried this goal multiple times without success.

It always seems like something major is happening in November for me and usually it is work related. I have tried to participate while doing datacenter moves, builds, and disaster recovery exercises. I do not blame these things for my own personal failure at completing the challenge, but they did make things harder.

I know I can write a novel length work because I have done it. Still I have not done this and it is something I want to have achieved. So this year I will be trying once again to complete NaNoWriMo. I do not have anything yet that conflicts with this so if I fail I have no excuse other than I did not motivate myself to do it. That is actually the biggest reason I have not completed it.

I have not decided if I want to start something brand new or take one of my Fiction Fragment Fridays and develop it. I do have multiple chapters of most of them so that would go against the spirit of writing the entire work in November unless I rewrote it all.

Throughout November I will be blogging about this whether I am successful or not. I will be sharing challenges, successes, inspiration, and setbacks. I find that I do better when I hold myself accountable by setting expectations with others. That was how I finished my Skies of Glass Serial fiction years ago. Perhaps 2021 needs a weekly serial fiction story. A year long story is novel length.

Welcome

I want to welcome you to my new home on the internet. I wanted to create a single place that I could direct people in order to find all my various podcasts, actual plays, and writing projects. You can follow me on social media using the links on the right bar to get more up to date information.

What you can expect from this site is regular blogs that could be anything from project updates, reviews of geek materials, my rambling thoughts, or flash fiction. This will be the first place I will mention new projects going forward and serve as the launch site for them.

This site will be a work in progress and an experiment. Things that work I will continue with and things that don’t will be phased out.

I want to thank you for spending your time here and I look forward to making 2020 the year of long standing project completion.

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