Getting ready -- What are you doing?

Wow dude!! You got a lot of reading to do! I'm lucky to finish one book in a freaking...year! Haha!

I was lucky this year and had an idea spring up in my mind last month...it got me just ITCHING to start nano! Unlike the other past years, this is a whole new idea with a fresh batch of characters right out of my mind oven.
Usually for prep, I start going back and reading my old stuff, get a new journal to take with me on the go, and stock up on coffee. :D

It's gonna be a great year! Good luck to everyone!!

-V

-V

I read a lot, as well. I start journaling more. I daydream and doodle more when I have writing to that needs to get done.

I'm hoping to get through a few books by Nov. 1, only because I don't think I'll be reading much during the month of november. :)

I plan to have about 250,000-350,000 English characters in my novel. But that's only if I plan on making the bare 50,000 words.

: P

I've decided to step out of my "Comfort Genre" for November. I'm stepping into Sci-fi and am planning a time travel novel.

Yesterday I started an index card box where I can start researching some different time periods. I'll work on character sketches. I'll have some notes on different locations to use.

I've always been crap at making outlines, but I'm thinking of giving it a shot.

Sometime this month I'll clean off my 'writing project' bulletin board. It's still filled with character sketches & actor's pictures I used when writing my script for Frenzy back in April. Although I really liked some of the characters I used there, so I may keep some of them to work back in. Their voices still feel fresh in my head.

Heya - I was thinking of stepping out and doing something time-travel-y as well!

Except you definitely seem a lot more planned than I do - good luck!

Well, let's see. I have my station set up with my day and word count-down. I've started my character sketches along with visuals of what the MC's will look like. I have a notebook started and files ready to go. I've also started outlining the first chapters. I know better, the book always goes off on it's own once I get started, changing what I wanted to write, but I did it anyway.

Jeannie G

NaNo 2008 Bridge Over Troubled Waters
NaNo 2007 Paper Roses
NaNo 2006 Turn of The Page
NaNo 2005 Any Way The Wind Blows
NaNo 2004 Bad Moon Rising

Well, I only heard of NaNoWriMo about a few weeks ago, but since then I've had a lot of ideas. I've written a really short sci-fi story (visible here, and I had more planned for it. For this I decided to go off the wall and make something totally different, with an alternate medieval scene to it. I've planned out my few characters to the max, and the backgrounds for each civilization and all that jazz. I normally do outlines but I've only planned out a few points along the story, and I'll go from there. I am itching to write, I wonder if I can last a month. I'll probably read through my collection by then. 8)

-Nick

It can be frustrating to wait until November, but the thrill of reaching the 50K before the end of November is worth the wait! Welcome to NaNo, Nick.

Grady

NaNoWriMo 2005/2007 Winner -- The Storm (WIP)
NaNoWriMo 2006 Winner -- Dragon Secrets (WIP)
Script Frenzy 2007 Winner -- The Choice
NaNoWriMo 2008 -- Untitled

I've been reading a lot, and I downloaded yWriter, which looks to be quite helpful in keeping me organized this year. I haven't done much else in the way of preparing, but I have a strong concept, and I'm hoping to see more characters emerge over the next two weeks.

I now hve a topic, but nothing beyonfd that. I plan to read lots of chick lit (yay library) & start a notebook with... notes. and ideas.

2007 ~ Seventh Year as a Nanowrimo Partipant

Yeah I keep a notebook around with me so I can always write something down when an idea pops into my head. I'm also writing as much background as possible whenever I can.

I've got an idea for the story, and roughly an Idea of when it's going to be set. After that I''m going to make it up as I go. It'll be set in a universe I've already created in other projects, so I have a decent background starting point to jump off from.

In 2005 I started after Nov 1st and used a few dares to get me going. I had a halfway decent plot developing and around the 20th I knew I could not finish the 50,000 in the month. In 2006 I thought about it, figured out my plot and other things - customs for civilizations, ect. I was jonesing to write that story starting in Sept. I wrote about 5000 words total on it in Nov, and to this day have not worked on it since. In 2007 I had my concept, and a few notes, and that was about it for preparation, and I finally won on the third try at NaNo.

so, here's to winging it in 08!

Indecision May Or May Not Be My Problem.

I'm raiding the forums for food ideas, things to make me smile, advice for how to /notfreakout/ come mid-November, and am going to make sure to have laundry done (I think I can survive for a month if I do it all before then) and food bought (unfortuately, I'm one of the few people who has a car amongst my friends... which means that I may be dragged out for things... >_<) before the first of the next month.

Oh yeah, and I'm freaking out a little.

And I WILL outline my story, I WILL, because I want to finish.

Music, my heart. Writing, my soul. Gaming, my life.

I'm storyboarding scenes right now (to prepare for my phase outline) and creating my list of characters. I'm fleshing out the characters as ideas come to me, and doing some research for the plot as well. I know I will write better and relax into it more if I'm prepared and have a framework beforehand!

I'm also trying to get some big projects done for work so that I'm not under a lot of external stress, too. The deadlines match up to getting done before NaNo anyway, so it works out for all involved. :-) I'm going to probably work all this weekend, but that's just prep for writing all weekends in November...right?

I also have to go out and buy a new flash drive--mine JUST went out today with absolutely no warning. Ugh. At least it didn't wait until November.

www.papergraffiti.com - found your writing on the wall

ARGH!!!
I LOST my flash drive a few weeks ago! I'm pretty sure I have everything saved on my laptop (except for the lastest copy of my dissertation - the one I saved after working on it most of a Saturday... yeah, I feel smart). I'm trying to cheer myself up by thinking about the new one I'm going to buy, but I don't even want to find out what else I've lost! (I know all my NaNos are on that flash drive... I *think* they're all on my laptop too, but I don't know and I'm too scared to look...)

:) Criss.

Criss, la Reina
www.crisswrites.com
crisswrites.blogspot.com

Criss, la Reina
DFW co-ML
www.crisswrites.com
http://crisswrites.blogspot.com

Oh man, that totally sucks...a document I was working on for my job was all borked and it took me about an hour to fix things. I was able to recover all of it, but it was still an hour I can't get back. Grrr. Of course it has to happen on the day I am working from home, meaning I'm going to have to go up to the office tomorrow and email myself files. Bah.

I hope you find a good drive! I may swing into Fry's and see what they've got for me, plus I get to exchange this one for a new one where we got them for work. I just want something trustworthy for backing up my novel and for carting files in between my laptops!!

www.papergraffiti.com - found your writing on the wall

I lose flash drives all the time: usually one will disappear for a few weeks (or months, or even a year, once), until one day -- poof!-- it'll be back, looking all innocent, as if nothing had ever happened. As much as I would like to blame the cat, I suspect we've got some holes in the space time continuum around here. :)

To back up my back-ups, I usually email a copy to myself and let it sit in my inbox online, or lately I've just been uploading it to my gmail account. It's an especially convenient way of doing things if you want to work on something from another location, but have forgotten your flash drive, mislaid it, or it has fallen through a tiny wormhole.

Kat

After this experience, I think Google Docs is going to be my best friend.

I gave up yesterday and bought a new flash drive. As soon as I finish going through email, I'm loading all my stuff onto the new drive, and opening up the old dissertation file to re-do the work I lost.

I HAVE to have the disseration finished before NaNo, or my husband might divorce me. Which would make me very, very sad. Next weekend he's going out of town, so I'll have a massive writing weekend, hopifully knocking out the last 15 pages. I do have to say, NaNo has helped me write this dissertation: the "write now - even if it's utter carp - edit later" philosophy years of NaNoing has trained me to follow made me get the words on paper; I wote the first 12 pages of the paper in one weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to channel that spirit again next weekend. :)

(Oh, editing the disseration? Well, my dad has to help with that... and he's out of the country until December. It need to be written before Nov. 1st, it won't be ready to submit until sometime in December... :P )

Criss, la Reina
DFW co-ML
www.crisswrites.com
http://crisswrites.blogspot.com

Today I came across this vlog (http://watchmebe.livejournal.com/587994.html) by Jackson Pearce, dedicated to US, Wrimos!!! In the video she explains the process of outlining and discusses its merits.

If you prefer the YouTube link, it's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NP9XDolsYY

(Jackson Pearce's blog can be found here: http://watchmebe.livejournal.com/)

So what about you? How many of you outline, either for NaNo or for non-NaNo novels? How many are write-by-the-seat-of-the-pantsers? How many of you are ambidextrous and can write either way?

I have been known to try outlining, but my characters always decide to do things their own way anyway, completely disregarding my neatly outlined ideas. I do mull things over in my head quite a bit before I write, though, so I guess I do quite a bit of paperless outlining. :P

:) Criss.

Criss, la Reina
DFW co-ML
www.crisswrites.com
http://crisswrites.blogspot.com

Criss,
Thanks for the link to the Jackson Pearce Vlog - good information and it almost made it sound quite simple to do an outline for a novel. I'm an avid fan of outlines and required them of my students when I taught writing courses at a community college.

So why am I finding it so HARD to draft an outline for a story I want to tell????? I can't decide if my outline is too basic or if I'm jumping into too many details too quickly (probably the latter).

Help me Obi Wan.... you're my only hope! *hee*

Tina

I'm making my usual massive mindmap, which is my preferred way of "plotting" (in quotes because even when i come up with a plot sometimes it never gets written anywhere other than the mindmap). You'd think it would be smaller than usual because most of the information is already established (I'm writing fanfiction), but nooooo....it's huge, although not quite as large as the one from '06 which i almost completely discarded in the end.

I'm coming up with titles for my chapters (oh no, I just realized I need a novel title too), which is harder than you'd think because a) I don't plot chapter divisions in advance, and b) due to the MC, I thought it would be fitting to make them in dead languages, and it's really really hard to find anything in ones other than Latin, much less anything relevant. Titling is the bane of my existence.

See, that's why I don't title anything until I absolutely have to. Titling and I, we don't get along.

~Jesso~

~Jesso~

On short stuff I don't title right away either, but when I want my chapters titled I have to do it as I'm writing because my editing process is virtually nonexistent. And if I have a title for my nano when I start I don't have to name the file NaNo 2008, which is kind of lame IMHO. Chapter titles are, of course, awesome because that's a few more words I don't have to write.

Lawl, my files are named so boringly. Since I use an Alphasmart, I upload it all regularly into files like nano11-01, nano11-05, etc, using the date as the file name so that at any given point I and see where I was on a certain day. Plus this year I want to use yWriter for keeping things organized, so I'll be plugging scenes into that and it will be saved as some generic yWriter file :P

Titles usually come to me towards the end. They are usually very simple and kind of silly.

~Jesso~

I don't know if this counts as "getting ready", but the accountant in me realized that it is feasible to do NaNo on weekends only this year (assuming you don't work on weekends. Accountant, remember?) This year, we have five full, glorious November weekends. That's 10,000 words a weekend, 5,000 words each day. I've easily done 5,000 words on weekends in previous NaNos.

Not that I'm planning to do this this year. But I wanted to share it with people who may be freaking out. I am going to use this strategy for the first weekend of the month, though, and try to hit 10,000 words by 11:59 p.m. on November 2nd. :)

It means Big Kitty, in secret Japanese.

PS, I'm getting ready for NaNo by studying for the GRE. I plan to have lots of very big words in my novel, and explanations of coordinate geometry. :-)

It means Big Kitty, in secret Japanese.

Heya kadair - me too! Or at least, I should be studying for the GRE, but more than likely I'll be writing for NaNoWriMo instead of studying all that useless geometry.

I'll be honest - the geometry bits intimidate me because I can't for the life of me formulate any desire to memorize/study all those dang formulas. Stupid no-formula rule! (But...if I can incorporate it in my novel (how??) maybe that's how I can remember them....)

I rather like the idea of using the vocab as part of our novel...maybe each day I write, I can challenge myself by trying to use as many synonyms for a word as I can..

Hmmm..I see a GRE/NaNo word war coming up...wanna try it out?

What am I *not* doing, more like...

I've just completed a 20 page outline, 180 pages of research notes, and presented a two-and-a-half hour class on the history of medicine for an SCA student group (UWSP - Falcon's Gate) -- made for a warm-up exercise AND will come into play as background.

As I'm setting the new book in an era of "my" future where there is already a fair amount of background developed, the supporting cast is well-fleshed / available. the specific protagonists are at least sketched along with the simple outline. Plus, I have a stable of stock characters and basic vignettes / subplot outlines that I use to build the identification with / coherence of the overall series ambience.

Working up to *that*, in part from having completed the research paper (see above). Will be complications, I'm certain, since I am currently on contract and away from home -- but THIS year I have my own laptop and will be doing less double-duty writing. In previous years, as much as 90% of my NaNoWriMo output was produced in longhand before transcription...

(see above) There will be additions to the existing cast, including at least two very new "major" human players and a number of significant nonhuman individuals AND races (or extensions / expansions for aliens previously mentioned by little more than names within the milieu).

Pax ... Kihe

Pax ... Kihe

[quote ReinaCriss]
How many of you outline, ... How many of you are ambidextrous and can write either way?

LOL!

I'm actually taking the GRE tomorrow afternoon ... YIKES ... I've spent today "studying" math with a friend who is really good at math (and who needed a distraction because his bf was being a jerk). So, hopefully, I'm ready. If not, it's a little late now...

As we were studying we realized that we could find the perimeter of the triangle cut into a ceiling tile/art kind of thing hanging from the ceiling at Starbucks, if only we knew the length of the side of the thing. *sigh* But I understand the formula now!!!

So, maybe you can work that bit into your novel ... I see a whole new world of possible things to write into mine at this point. (I am writing a comedy, so trying to determine the perimeter of a triangle on a piece of art at Starbucks really could fit into the story...)

Here is a good GRE word for you: intransigence. Seriously, it popped up on a practice test, and the next day, it showed up in the novel I'm reading right now (Love in the Time of Cholera.) Consider yourself challenged! :-)

It means Big Kitty, in secret Japanese.