NaNoWriMo Progress and Excerpts

We’re heading into the last week of NaNo now and I’m feeling confident. Didn’t have much of a chance for word count this weekend, but I have less than 8k left to write. I can definitely bust that out in a day or two. Just in time for the arrival of my copy of Persona 4: Golden. Which is awesome, because I was worried that I couldn’t resist opening it right away and getting sucked in to hours of RPG goodness.

I’m hoping to finish or at least make a huge dent in that word count tomorrow. For now, here are a couple of excerpts from my nano novel, which takes place in the future of the same universe as my webserial. Just a warning: they’re unedited, so there might be some nanoisms in there.

Exercise and NaNoWriMo

So my Sunday writing session resulted in 8,345 words added to my NaNo novel. Which means that I more than doubled my word count. Word count get!

Still behind a few thousand words, but that’s much more manageable than being 11k words behind.

I’ve been thinking about my sudden burst of writing motivation and it occurs to me that it might be at least partially because my exercise schedule is finally getting back to normal after Superstorm Sandy and the resulting gas shortages.

I normally attend hour-long group fitness classes (mostly Zumba, but with some Yoga and Belly Dancing in there) 5 out of 7 days of the week. Because of the disruptions from the storm, I couldn’t exercise regularly for most of the beginning of November. My schedule finally started getting back to normal on Thursday. I wound up attending classes Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in a row and I’ll be exercising again later this morning.

I definitely notice the difference. Without exercising, I start to feel moodier, unmotivated, and just generally shitty. It’s hard to get interested in or feel good about my writing. With exercising, I feel better about myself and my writing adventures. I’m more optimistic. I have more energy and I can focus better. Which makes sense. There’s tons of information out there about the benefits of exercising regularly. Not sure why it didn’t occur to me sooner that that might be part of what was going on.

Which reminds me of previous NaNo sessions’ forum threads about giving up exercising for NaNo. I’ve only really started exercising regularly within the last year, so I didn’t think about it much before. Now I know that I definitely can’t give up exercising for NaNo.

While it’s true that exercising is, at face value, taking time away from writing, I know that in my case that’s not true in the long run. Exercising is like a recharge so that I can more effectively utilize my time and actually get writing done.

I think this unintentional experiment has certainly proven that, for me, exercising is an absolute necessity during NaNoWriMo. Looking forward to much more word count (and sweating) to come during the rest of November!

Lagging Word Count

Still not totally feeling this NaNoWriMo session. I’ve had a lot on my mind, sure, but if I’m being totally honest I definitely did have the time to get writing done over the past week or so of November. I just haven’t been motivated to write much. I did get the two webserial updates I had planned for last week done (albeit not on the timeframe I expected) and Monday’s update is written and waiting for editing/posting. So I have been writing, just not as much as I should/could have.

And my NaNo novel has suffered for it. I think I’m about 11k or so words behind at this point. I’m also realizing that my outline actually covers a lot less than I thought it did. While writing them, I realized that things I had marked as separate chapters worked better as scenes in the same chapter and several scenes worked better if I combined them. So now my outline only covers maybe three or four chapters. Ultimately, that’s probably fine. Just means I get to the point where I have to pants it faster. So glad I wrote out a general list of ideas for things to happen later in the novel.

Maybe it’s because I finally have the serial updates back on schedule or because the bits of the serial that I’ve written recently have rekindled my interest in those characters and their future daughter, but today I’m feeling motivated to work on my NaNo novel.

I’m aiming to do some serious catching up today. Going to put on my playlist of video game adventure music, close my browser, use Scrivener’s full screen mode, and bust out words like crazy.  If I recall correctly, my best word count for one day was somewhere around 9k. Hoping to match or beat that personal record. I’ll update later on the progress I made.

NaNoWriMo Begins!

First, I just want to say that my heart goes out to everyone still suffering the effects of Hurricane Sandy. I live on Long Island, so we got hit hard. My family lost power for 36 hours almost exactly, but considering the southern portion of my town was completely flooded and hundreds of thousands of people are still without power, we got lucky.

It was kind of hard to get excited about starting NaNoWriMo today. I actually forgot all about it last night. I did manage to get the target word count for today, but didn’t get as far ahead as I wanted to. The word count bar looks so pitiful. Must try harder tomorrow. Maybe do some of the word sprints on Twitter.

Of course, it doesn’t help my word count that my most productive writing times also happen to be the times of the day that my rabbit is most active and desperate for attention. NaNo usually winds up becoming an exercise in typing with one hand while leaning down to pet the rabbit with the other. If I don’t, Houdini likes to remind me that he’s there by thumping, jumping in my lap, or jumping in my lap and then thumping. Sometimes he also surprise destroys something in my room. It’s kind of cute, but it makes it very difficult to write. I like to think of it as “rabbotage”. Just another obstacle to overcome in my quest for 50k.

I also have to work on the webserial. Due to the hurricane, I skipped this week’s update and intend to do a double update next week. Which means another 6k-ish of words on top of the daily NaNo word goals that needs to be written. Probably should have tried harder to get that buffer I wanted. Welp, I’ve done it before, so it should be fine.

Interestingly enough, talking about how hard it’s going to be makes me more excited to write. Bring it on November.

FYI: For anyone also participating in NaNoWriMo (or anyone who wants to see a picture of my rabbit’s nose), my username is blizzardjade.