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

I Find This Out Now?!

Great.

Funnily I was assuming that my backpack, which I used for carrying my laptop to NaNo meets last year, was lying safely forgotten at the back of my closet unused. But last night I sort of got thinking, "Hmm, yeah, the backpack. Should probably start getting it out right about now. Just a week of preps left." And then it hit me, shoot, it's not here!

And it's not just a matter of "oh I forgot it at grandma's." No I didn't forget it at grandma's. I didn't forget it at work. I didn't forget it in the car. I forgot it abroad.

Yes. Total shoot-yourself-in-the-foot moment, innit? So unfortunately it isn't a simple case of just popping next door and picking it up.

I've got a small job from which I should be getting a bit of coin so I can pay the public transport for November. Hopefully I'll get that in time, and then it's just a case of dashing out like a mad chicken to find another bag. Don't get me wrong, I love shopping (and I mean really love shopping). Just kind of annoying. I could use that same money to buy something more useful, like...the next Kingdom Hearts game or the latest DVD installment of Naruto.

Last week of October is turning out to be the most hectic. I'm not 100% if the money will make it in time, if I'll find a decent bag in time, and also I haven't gotten in touch with my writing rival yet. I wonder if he's doing NaNoWriMo this year?

Besides that, and it was probably kind of inopportune, but I've re-discovered the magic of my PS2.

Oh man, I wonder how November will go... LOL ^__^