Preparing for 2010 NaNoWriMo

I'm getting ready for this year's National Novel Writing Month. Last year I wasn't successful in my attempt. This year I have some of the same time constraints that I had last year, but I will be trying to take a week of vacation to give me some extra writing time.

Last year I planned to write a retro-science-fiction story set during World War I. This time I'll be writing an adventure story set during the Second Angl0-Afghan War. I did some research last year and I'm currently getting a few characters and scenarios into the back of my mind so I'll be ready to start writing on November 1st.

I'll try to give regular updates of my writing status as the month progresses. The goal for the 30 days is 50,000 words. A sizable amount, but it should be easy to accomplish, even with work and other obligations that need to be met.

This will hopefully be my first successful NaNoWriMo attempt. Last year was my first attempt, and I failed. My other novel in a month attempt was in June 2008 and netted over 40,000 words.

If you've always wanted to write a novel you might want to join me next week in writing. The goal is to get words on a page. Future months can be taken up by the clean-up and re-writes. Once the first 50,000 words are written, everything else is much easier.

Now all I need is a title for my new book...

NaNoWriMo Fail

Well I'm cutting my losses on this year's National Novel Writing Month. A couple reasons: Work has been very busy, I was under the weather for about ten days and had trouble focusing on writing, and even the Halloween event for City of Heroes ate up some of my time.

The big problem I was having was making a couple of my characters seem believable. I didn't like the way Kaiser Wilhelm II was coming across; it didn't really feel like a German emperor speaking. I need to do a lot more work to get this story in shape to actually be written.

So I'll be spending the rest of 2009 getting the draft of my first novel ready to be read by a number of proof readers and focus my energies there as well as developing my blogs and other online presences.

To-night is a meeting of the Rochester Writers Group that I'll have to attend. I missed the last one because I felt terrible.

I'll also try to post here a little more often....

Update

I haven't been able to add to my NaNoWriMo word count the last couple of days. I've been feeling under the weather and have been getting extra rest after work as opposed to writing. I'm nearly recovered and should be getting back to my novel to-morrow.

I guess I should have spent more than the hour or two I spent on Sunday. But I'm still confident I can hit 50,000 words by the end of the month (well, mostly confident anyway). With Thanksgiving and a few other weekends spread through the month (and possibly a week off from work) I should get caught up.

Gotta go get some more sleep now. Further and more interesting updates in the near future.

NaNoWriMo Day 1

It's been a good weekend. Watched a mini-marathon of Kolchack: The Night Stalker, played a great game of Axis & Allies on Friday night, played in the Halloween event on City of Heroes, spent some time at the gym, etc.

After posting to one of my other blogs I finally got started on my unnamed novel which I officially started today for this year's National Novel Writing Month. I don't have a title for it yet but I did get some of the action started. I've introduced the main character as well as one of the other major players. I'm not sure where this story is going to go, I didn't spend as much time on the outline as I should have.

As of right now my word count (according to Microsoft anyway) is 1,849 words. At that rate I should be able to write 55,470 words by the end of this whole thing. It's going to need a major re-write when I'm done, I already don't like some of the dialogue I've written. Oh well.

I'll try to make an update here every day to chronicle the progress of my project. Stay tuned.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 2009

I have a couple of ideas for novels for the upcoming National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). While I'm still trying to finish the draft of my first novel, which I wrote in June 2008, I want to make sure I participate in NaNoWriMo this year.

I've finally decided on a sort of retro-science fiction story set about 95 years ago. I had some other ideas, but the storylines of those would have been very bizarre with story structures unlike any other books I'm familiar with. It is probably best that I stick with a regular story structure for my first few books.

With the topic of my story determined, I am now preparing an outline so that I'm ready to start writing on November 1st. My current method of outlining a large story is with index cards. By using colored 3x5 cards I can organize the various scenes, characters, and backstory. Different colored cards are used for each category of information. This system has worked quite well for me in the past.

I'll be sure to give regular updates as I continue work on this new novel.