I Said I'd Do It And I Did

Well, there it is. 50,180 words of Arkanos typed out and verified by the original, notorious word-eating NaNoWriMo word count validator, believe it! :D (Incredibly, this year it gave me 3 words. My yWriter counter says I've got 50,177 words :P But meh, can't argue with the machine ^.^)

Arkanos is by no means finished. Heck I haven't even spotted the midway point on the horizon yet. I'll be participating in NaNoFiMo and batting out some more words on it, hoping to at least hit halfway home. I know if I drop off for a long time and only pick this up to continue say next July, I know my mind will have zoned-out of the setting to such a degree I won't really remember what's happened. Especially those mid-Write or Die session epiphanies that sound great but maybe aren't which you never bother to note down anywhere, but not like you'd have time to anyway. Those will be in risk of vanishing into the realm of not-coming-back if I just drop everything now as is.

I remember end of '09 NaNo I somehow felt so exhausted and like I just couldn't drag it out of myself to continue with Electrostatic Fantasy. It was missing two, three chapters and in dire need of editing. I told myself I should keep going, to get editing and finish up by the new year. Heck no, I was exhausted and slightly exasperated with the thing (and perhaps I'm not the only NaNoer who gets this). So I decided to take a short break, enjoy the holidays and get back to it later. Mistake. "Later" turned out to be three months later, then another break and then again a bit of editing in July. And by that time I'd "relaxed" so well and truly I couldn't remember the finer points anymore. My concept of my own story was, "oh yeah, there's that mermaid guy and he goes around and they do this kinda stuff don't they? And, oh yeah! There was that one character there, wasn't it?" I felt like walking up to someone else and asking what had happened!

Thank heavens it was pretty much completely written (okay, save for the final chapter which I haven't first-drafted to this day ^v^;;)

But I am nevertheless a NaNoWriMo 2010 winner!! XD

I can't get enough of that. And I've probably 24 hours worth of sleep dept to show for it too. :) I wanted that pretty certificate on my wall and I got it. Yeah, you heard correctly. My main reason for doing all of this was to get a certificate that had the number "2010" on it and which I knew I'd earned fair and square.

Today I took a day off of everything I've been working on: the greetings card making, the novel plotting, the novel writing (oh God yes!)... just everything. I slept until 4 PM and since then have been playing Valkyrie Profile 2. Then a nip into the sauna and voila! I feel like I've had a day at the spa. ^_^

And tomorrow I'm gonna start on a project I'm quite excited about: plots the next novel which I'm planning to write during JanNoWriMo. The current name is Through the Looking Glass, and you guessed it, it's also fantasy. Wha? No it's not an Alice in Wonderland spin-off or anything (although I love doing those!) Ironically the story bears no similarity to Lewis Carroll's work at all. I'll write more on it in another post and I'll probably be updating the My Novels page eventually about it too.

Until then...still basking in this moment that comes only once per a noveling November! ^_^

Some Excellent Advice For Getting Through NaNoWriMo, Getting Unstuck In Writing And Finishing Your Novel

TYPE, DAMMIT!

Oh dang...

I'm behind!

Day 17 of NaNo and I'm still hanging at just below 25K. Thank heavens I had that 3K buffer when I decided to take a break or I'd be so deep in the ground right now.

Although I have almost finished playing Aqua's story in Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep... See? I've been doing something. ^_^

Hoping to get on and bust out a nice 3K today. And according to my trusty calculator that's about what I'll need in order to catch up. Okay, strictly speaking it's 3.5K, but who's being that pedantic? ...*cough, cough*

The slightly worrying thing is that my interest in slightly waning. It's just that I'm approaching the magical 30K mark where Arkanos Book One died last time and I'm slowing down. Fingers crossed there won't be any repeat performances. =/ Just got to keep going I guess.

Better hurry off before I get stuck doing something else online again. Like watching Bleach or streaming YouTube vids or...

Not to give anyone the idea that I've got a standard list of stuff I get stuck doing or anything...

Boo-yah!!

I guess the capitalised Week Two of NaNoWriMo is the one that gives the most trouble to quite a few writers. It was the week in which, last year, I went three days without typing a single word, and finally had to force myself onto the keyboard lest the whole thing drop entirely.

This year, without even realising it until now, I applied the perfect cure to the Week Two curse before it even started. Extended Word War!

I'm having so much fun. I'm competing with a Writing Buddy to see who gets the higher word count by Friday midnight. And honestly, it gives me such a kick in the pants just thinking about this competition I'm in.

I might be ahead right now, at 20K. But I keep thinking that if I stop and take a day off, the next time I log in, next to his username there's going to be sparkling a number 5k bigger than mine with the words "mwa ha haa" materialising next to it and I'll have to re-enact a Luke Skywalker backwards suicide dive through the Death Star.

In other words, I doubt I'd be half as inspired right now had there been no Word War.

I also keep switching playlists; although I am still sticking mostly to RPG background music tracks, except for the occasional lapse into Breaking Benjamin albums for fight scenes (they're tough enough to write as it is, I need some sweet motivation ^__^).

And I finally got that synopsis written on my NaNo profile! :D *roars and applause* Better late than never, eh?

Yesterday was such a fantastic day! After getting past the first real fight scene on Tuesday, yesterday I wrote out a big dialogue & explanation bit and it was such a breeze. How refreshing to get to write a bit that is actually my forté. I bashed out a nice 3K as well!

Just need to keep the trend going. I'm expecting that I'll need to enter NaNoFiMo (National Novel Finishing Month) in December though. I mean I'm not counting my chickens before they hatch or anything, but I'm still not seeing this thing unfolding entirely in just 50K.

Well, next two weeks will say for sure. :)

NaNo Day 5: It's All About "De Mood"

Okay, vague Little Mermaid reference there, but it is all about "De Mood."

NaNoWriMo '10 has started and I'm frankly elated as a party balloon right about now. It's going well. It's going better than well. And that means it's going A LOT better than I feared it would just a month ago. This is all good stuff.

Right this minute my yWriter is announcing a total of 9485 words exactly and I'm not even done for the evening. :)

I never did write that synopsis in time (which I still need to do) but I did accidentally find the perfect playlist for fueling my keyboard tapping passion: I'm listening to game background soundtracks!

And not just any games, the Valkyrie Profile background soundtracks! XD All hail YouTube!

And this is what I mean about "de mood." When I tune in to those tunes, it sends me right into de zone. I mean I tap, tap, tap a little, check my count, turn on some beats, tap, tap tap some more and oh goodness how did that thousand words go by?

I'm also at the end of Chapter 2. Yay!

I wrote a letter to my grandma and in it I actually (again, accidentally) wrote one of the best synopses of Arkanos to date and I saved a copy of it. I should really translate it and get it posted on here and on NaNo. But right now, I'm way too tired for that (midnight).

Okay, need to get back to typing now. Sacramento has declared an official word war against Finland on their NaNo regional forum, and that means I've got to help my guys beat them. =3 They won last year, but only by 12 words per person. We were ahead of them until literally the last few days.

But not so easy this year. OOOOh no! XD