Next Year

Wow - you are keen! I can't even bear to think about editing what I wrote in the last two Nano's and have to get my last 2000 words done on this years effort and you are already contemplating next year!

Although perhaps thinking about something other than how to make my character less boring to me (all the side characters interest me, but the MC bores the pants off me) will help me suddenly come up with a brilliant idea to finish it off.

Oh and whilst not on the topic - this is the first year I know for a fact that I need to write at least another 10-20K to finish my story whereas other years I have been happy hitting between 50 and 55K and leaving it there.

Patched - I think your idea sounds fabulous, are you going to spend the year planning 1000 concepts or just hope they come to you? A fifty word story is pretty tough as it needs to be considered fully, not just havign words fly out of your fingers and hope they come together. A lofty target, but it sounds brilliant. I hope you share some next year.

If I can come up with a reasonable plot over the 11 months then I'll give it a shot, otherwise I'll muck about and only write a couple of thousand. :-)

I like the idea of 50 word stories. You can pack so much emotion into so few words and people reach the end go "awww?" and look for more. It's going to be interesting!

After last nano I needed a break. My story had taken itself to places I hadn't planned for and I was a little burned out from writing so much so fast but by January I was good to go again.
I think next year I'll be working on a joint story with a few other people; we'll each write a section and patch it all together.

There are some people in the wider forums that set goals for wordcounts over the 11 months that isn't nano.

I can't believe people are actually thinking about next year already! Still though, that does leave 11 months for pre-Nano planning...

I'm thinking I might revert to writing another mystery next year. Although I got a lot more words done this year, I liked last year's novel a lot better and think it was much better writing than I did this year.

I've been thinking a bit about next year and I was thinking of doing something along the same lines...
Pretty much just a whole bunch of stories and poems all put together. They'll all be linked in some way to one another, but mine might be a bit longer then 50 words. I could never stop at 50!

The first time a friend suggested doing Nano to me I had been writing short creative stories for a while online. At first the thought of doing 50,000 words was terribly daunting. Then I hit upon the idea of doing just what you said - writing a short stories and stringing them altogether.

In a way it was like writing a short story about each scene that made the big story. I hoped it would work and help me get to the wordcount goal. It did. I've used the same strategy every year since.

So, I think you've got a good idea and I reckon it will work for you!

Good luck with next year.

Red, the Dragon who doesn't write novels - only short stories

I do like the idea of the short stories. It's a very popular form of fiction these days. Some of the 90's 'Doctor Who' short story collections had an overall theme to each one, which is still going on in that form today.

Whenever I described my story, and said that there were 150 shipped off to my new planet, I was often asked what about all the other 'perverts' left on Earth, surely there can't be only 150.
But no, that's where part 2 comes in. My happy little planet has survived two winters alone, people are pairing off and having the next generation, things are growing nicely.
Then another ship arrives, with people who are all confused and upset by being sent away, and have trouble fitting in, as well as my original colonists who were quite happy on their own.
I'm all set for another Nano.

I think next year I might take the plunge and continue my major story (which I want to make mental love to, even though the written component isn't that great). This year I was just too afraid of ruining it, or getting caught up trying to figure things out and suffering on the word count.

It's either that or this other story I have in mind called Storm Town, where a town is constantly bombarded with torrential rain and gale-force winds, so much so that no buildings can be built, and the only residences are subterranean, which have been sealed against the mud etc. The relatively low-tech society can barely harvest enough food in the calm periods to sustain itself, and is isolated into the seperate sub-terranean buildings for long periods. Basically, this results in massive political unrest - the society is pretty much a dictatorship, and the leader wants to sacrifice the people's scarce surface time for a controversial project that could save or destroy them.... Enter espionage.

And interesting idea I read in a sci-fi novel with people who were subterranean, they grew a lot of mushrooms and fungi. That was their main diet.
Would get kinda boring after a while.