Balls and Walnuts
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NaNoWriMania Day 5
On the North Coast, the storms begin in earnest after Halloween. I’ve been cooling my heels all afternoon waiting for this one to blow over. From a NaNoWriMo point of view, this is a good thing: I’m home writing rather than out shopping. 2,163 words today — go me!
Of course, we’re all snails compared to Paperback Writer (see Go Cheetahs). Sheila’s November word count sits at 34,052 — as of yesterday. AND she finds time to blog.
SO . . . I’m looking at the monitor, thinking, are these good words? As I understand, the point of the exercise is to tear down a few internal writing barriers, and give the muse a few hits of crack (oops! here on the North Coast, crank is the drug of choice) or perhaps an enema (is that the better metaphor, considering what I’m putting down on the page?)
Is it all crap? Sadly, while you can upload a text file of your novel to the NaNoWriMo site, all they give you is a word count. They need to install a crap-o-meter. Then again, if they did that, folks who pegged the meter might get discouraged and drop out of the contest.
It’s nearly impossible for me to figure out if my novel is kaka or not. I haven’t reread any of it, since That Way Lies Disaster. I’m delighted to report that I have a plot, characters who are not boring, conflict, complications, and an overall plan which includes an ending. I guess I should be happy that I have that much.
My problem is, I’m playing with hardboiled conventions, so I’m wondering whether each character or plot element is (A) trite, or (B) necessary to fit the genre. The dead bodies have to start piling up . . . don’t they?
D.
Technorati tag: NaNoWriMo
PS: So far, I have Maureen, Invisible Lizard, and Jona on my NaNoWriMo friends list. You folks who are WriMing, can you tell me your usernames so I can add you to my list?
My username is dshoffman, by the way ;o)
Hey Doug!
I’m taking part in NaNoWriMo and am currently at 12,000 words (woo hoo!).
Feel free to add me to your list; I enjoy your blog entries by the way.
Hey Doug, my username is RobynH.
Feel free to add me to your list. I’m not as fast as Zette, although I will treasure last year when she went off to… somewhere, and for a whole day, I had a higher word count. Didn’t last, but hey, she inspired me to greater things.
Oops. Forgot to tell you my username. It’s PDAbbamondi. See ya there!
Thanks, folks. I’ll be tickled if I finish my 50K. This business of finishing NaNoWriMo in less than 2 weeks is WAY beyond me.
hazelnutcoffeegirl
I think it’s assumed that some of what we write will be crap, but we’ll sort that out in December. Personally, I’m keeping a separate document of things I want to go fix later, like one character who needs to be older and suddently does so in the middle of chapter two.
The point is that crapping out 50k random words is still a lot of work, and kudos to those who can do it. The greater the percentage of that which is usable later, even better for us down the road.
Sounds like you’re too hard on yourself. I just checked your NaNo profile, and you’re well ahead of schedule.
But Liz, you should know by now how much I love to complain.
Sorry. User name is Jaye Patrick
My Nano username is Lysiart Fenval. Don’t even know how I came up with that one. 🙂
My wordcount?
Don’t ask.