Izmir Calling..

I am a Brit living in Turkey so if there are anymore of you out there then please jump on..

This is my first NaNo so I shall be burning the midnight oil I guess..

Very relieved to say that I have sort of an idea forming but I am a writer who does not plot and plan... I like to get it down as it comes...

Good luck everyone..xx

Hi there! I'm also "yabancı" from around Izmir and would love to hear from other Turkish residents participating this year.

I have a moderately fleshed-out character (maybe two) and a few competing story ideas (or, rather, germs thereof) floating in my head. I'd like to decide, hopefully before November, which of these ideas may be most promising, but I'm generally not very good with making tough choices...

Thank you for starting the thread, mrsnazilli!

Good luck to everyone! Başarılar!

Heya,
I'm living in İzmir too, but I'm actually Turkish, so I'm not sure if I count =P This will be my second NaNo, last year I couldn't finish my novel, I couldn't even go halfway. So I don't really trust myself about this, but I'm gonna try hard. I actually have three characters now, with their backgrounds and etc. But the plot isn't clear yet. Got so much to think....
Anyways, good luck to you both =)

Hello everyone,

I'm participating from Denizli. I visit Izmir often for business tho.

Anyways, I have two ideas, if I go with the first, I will be writing in Turkish and there'll be lots of natives. It will be mainly located on Izmir (which will hopefully provide me with better/more locations than Denizli.)
If I go with the second, I will be writing in English and there'll be lots of Koreans... Don't ask why, haha.

I still haven't made up my mind but if I decide to do this, I will hit that nasty 50000 words. I'm sure that novel(la) will be a tough bitch when I have to log all those work/gym/freelance/tutoring hours. Oh well, I have a thing for bitches, so bring it on!

By the way, I'm surprised but it seems like I'm the only native around here.

Hope to see you all around.

I wonder if it's the local laid-back culture that none of us seem to have a mapped-out, detailed outline less than three days ahead of NaNo. :)

By the way, it's nice to see some Turkish-Turkish people here as well!

Hi All. I live 2 hours north of Izmir and this is my first Nanowrimo. Very nervous. I also have a rough idea mapped out - so I reckon it is the laid back influence of the area :) Good Luck everyone! Jan

Haha, I totally agree with you all... and I have good news!!!

I happen to read Chris Baty's "No Plot No Problem" (which I'd recommend if you're really up to this, he introduces NaNoWriMo and explains why this 30 days work throughly) a couple of years ago. He actually suggests bringing nothing on the table for NaNoWriMo, as an old-therefore-forgotten/interrupted/unfinished project might hunt the unfortunate writer with relapses of problems that she faced during those projects.

Some push would make a real difference, so don't get lost anytime soon. I actually left the initial project that I was working on and I am to start anew. Honestly, it's impossible not to get all fired up about what you're going to be writing but so far I resisted the urge to sit down and start sketching away the characters, places etc. Hope it will work out the way he suggested and we will all be able to turn around that Aegean laziness to our advantage (^_~)

Soooo excited!! We're only hours away from a terrific ride! I'm dying to meet your characters!!! please, let's keep the thread alive :)

btw, can we change genre midway?

Hi everyone,

This is Diyarbakir calling :) I have already started to write before Nanowrimo but I will keep moving faster this month I guess. I have written around 25K words (breaking, going on, breaking etc. not quite progressive until last month) but I hope to finish the novel around 80-90K words.

It will be tough to write 50K words but I hope I will manage to write 25K words at least. As it is a long-term project, I don't have a chance to write anything that comes to my mind. :/ :)

Good Luck everyone

Let's keep each other motivated :)

hello everyone, I'm only at a petty 681.. and I really want to sleep :///

how are you all guys doing?

btw, where do we see our stats?

I'm kind of in a bad mood right now... Luckily, I write better when I'm in a bad mood.
3323 words so far. Some more coffee and I'll keep going.

Stats are in profile I guess, the fourth tab, next to the Novel Info thingie.

Great to know there are so many aspiring writers like myself living closeby. Keep up the good work everyone and good luck for Day 2 . It's very nice to meet you all :))

I suffered through the first 600 words, then some more through the next 1000, and then wrote about 1300 more before I even noticed it. I guess the trick is to keep steady through the rough parts and you're bound to come to the scenes that fly faster than you can type.

Happy writing in Day 2!

Haha, I found the stats, thanks!

I'm following you guys from a day behind (didn't write anything on Nov 1st) but better late than never, right :))

Good luck y'all!

Fellow wrimos, how are you planning to handle the upcoming Kurban Bayram? Any lucky ones who can just write away during the holidays?

As for me, I'll be away throughout the week, and (a) I doubt I'll be able to write much, (b) I usually have trouble returning to an unfinished task after a long enough break. Which means I should write at least 10,000 words in the next couple of days not to get too far behind... Yeah, right.

Still, curious about your plans. Great job, everyone! Even the late starters seem to be catching up very quickly. :)

Same for me. Bayrams, traditionally, are not times we spare for writing nanowrimo novels. I doubt I can write a single word during the holiday. Sadly, our word count should hit 15000 at the end of Bayram and I'm still at 7000s.. And I have no plans for this serious problem yet.
But I do have plans for Bayram:) I will be with my family. Hopefully my little cousins will be there and I plan to commit some artistic experiments and observations over them. Since my story involves some children I hope these observations will be helpful when I go back to writing (by the way, I don't know but I think I'm writing a children's book, which is so far away from my original intentions:))).

I'm kind of lucky I guess... All my relatives are far away, some in Sweden, some in Iran (yeah I see the contrast here). I'll probably spend a day with grandpa, and one more day visiting grandma's grave, and that's it. And I'm pretty sure I can write those days.

lcdvn - I'm sure you can do it. Don't quit for 10000 words. A weekend with some snacks can easily solve that problem =)

ozgun - Children's books are awesome! I sometimes read them actually, and I'm 19 years old... Anyways, you got some luck there. And the weekend with snacks thing can help you too...

I agree with Adrithiel, you guys can catch the word count later. You guys were so good at it so far :)

...and I was thinking (as a late boomer should) that, this holiday would be a writing fest for me as well... but I didn't take the fact that a lot of my high school buddies are in town to spend some time with their families into account and now my door bell is buzzing, people that I haven't seen in years (aka people that I can't resist) glowing up my phone and my quality time with my characters is slowly getting lost in the horizon with each call I answer and with each lunch I plan.

Well, I will still try to take advantage of revisiting the memories, observing what life did to people etc. and let my imagination run wild and hopefully alter some happy and/or not so happy high school memories and render adventurous and vivid scenes... but I will be mostly keeping my eyes on the word count and typing away all the bs that I can think of cuz I'm like way behind. I need to catch up!

@ozgun, I think a children's book is a brilliant idea. it must be an exhilarating experience, and it sure beats my characters quarreling again and again by giving each other silent treatments, they suck at even falling in love when they were supposed to have that great romance. They can bicker on a melted ice cream for pages... pathetic but it does help the word count go up anyway, hehe.

good luck to you all and happy holidays!

ps: İs there any interesting characters, events etc. that you guys wanna introduce us? I'm so curious, please tell me more about your novel(la)s!!!!
:)

That was 300 words right there and much easier than typing away a fight over a melted ice cream hahaha. :) wish me luck!

Good luck! =P

And since you asked... My novel is about being left out. There is this island that I've made up (that has no name and three cities), and my main character woke up one morning and realized that all the other people are gone. Currently she is driving around the island, looking for other people and reminiscing some stuff about her past. I have no idea about whereabouts of those other people. I didn't plan at all and I'm sure I'll get stuck somewhere... As for the interesting characters... I work really hard to not prepare any cliché characters, but this character? I didn't prepare this character. It just came along as I write.

Ruby was alone in the island for three years. She is the first one to get in this weird 'alone-in-the-island' stuff. And in three years, she got a little weird. She is convinced that all the people went ona holiday for a year and then came back. They didn't. They're still gone and Ruby is imagining things. She still works at the Little Silverlake, a market that named after the city (this is the point where my creativity died), getting paid by invisible customers with invisible money. She sometimes acts normal and seems well aware of what is going on around. Then she gets a little confused and starts to see her family again.

I have no idea why I'm writing about her and now I got curious too. What is everyone doing? Give us some novel info, maybe some characters? =)