Rocks

-Bonus points if you have rocks fall on them all, but work it into the story (I.E. New character: "Hey, did you hear about that horrible building collapse a few streets over? Wild stuff!")
-Double bonus points if you manage to have them all implausibly survive and come back later.
-Triple bonus points if they come back only to engineer the equally implausible rockfall related death of your new characters (because by then you will hate them too)

:D

I really can't say much though, as I ended up burning a house down in my first sentence because I couldn't think of anything else to do. Man, NaNo buildings just don't have the structural integrity they used to...

During November, it's ok to take off in a completely new direction mid story. One of the things I use is to just leave off mid story and pick up at a different point in my novel, during or after some big event. Then I just continue from the new point. Frequently I find later that my subconscious has solved or rewritten the previous section and I can go back and pickup where I left off. Resis the urge to delete anything. If you don't like the piece of story you just wrote, try starting the next paragraph by rewriting it from a different point of view just to keep things moving, even if the point of view even if it is from a rock's point of view *wink*. Save both versions, they both count towards your word count.

As kids we fried ants with magnifying glasses. Now that we are adults we fry characters in far more interesting ways with plot twists

Does having astaroids flatten a building count as rocks? Because if so, I've got that coming up here soon.

Granted, they're metal not actual rock, but it still ought to count, right?

When suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, what happens when science and magic come together?

Just got my ding, 1716 in about an hour. It makes me nervous to go so close to the bare minimum rate for hitting 50k by the end of the month but I guess racing ahead is for the non-holiday weekends.

I ended up with just over 4300 by the end of Sunday, which I am happy with. Of course, I wouldn't actually want people reading about half of the end product. I was concentrating on quantity not quality.

Speaking of things you don't want anyone to read...

I'm pretty happy with my word count (although I have confirmed that yes, I will feel like crap after getting home from my new job and so should try to do more on my days off). Unfortunately, the word count is largely padded by the MC having phone conversations or talking to her cat. An earthquake would make things much more interesting, but I can't see how I could work one into the plot. Maybe a different story with the same characters, though.

Unlike last year where I think I hated my novel before we even finished the kick-off write-in, I'm feeling okay about things this year. Of course, right now I keep flipping between the "present" and the going back to reminiscent back story stuff, which gives the draft this whole CW-television-show feel, but you know, no one is ever going to read this draft, so no one will ever know, right?

My story is about a landscape crew, so rocks will definitely fall. Not yet sure whether they'll crush crew or homeowner.

I ended Day Two about 60 words short -- not great, but far from out of the game.

BB

Author, Minus One: A Twelve-Step Journey
www.bridgetbufford.com

LOL Rocks just fell on my entire plot and on Nov 3rd I am restarting a completely different story from scratch. I'm keeping the first stuff I wrote as it may actually work into what I am writing now and it is in fact fiction written during November, so technically it counts. Also, it's only about 4k words and if I only make 54k total I'll be incredibly disappointed, so i don't mind counting the previous effort even if I only use a little bit of it.

As kids we fried ants with magnifying glasses. Now that we are adults we fry characters in far more interesting ways with plot twists

On day 2 I decided that I didn't really like my opening. I resisted the urge to rewrite and just stuck a note in there saying what I wanted to actually have as the opening. They I went back to writing, pretended that the opening had already changed.