Category: Writing A Novel

NaNoWriMo Day 6

Day 6 Greetings! Day 6 and I’m surviving. I’m drinking a lot of green tea and herbal tea. (I only drink coffee when I go out somewhere). That means I’m reminded every hour or so that I need to get up and stretch my legs. I’ve gone back over some of my earlier chapters and added descriptions to fit better with how the story’s evolving, but I’ve realized that means my word count slows down. I think I have a better idea of who’s who now, though, and why they do the things they do. I think that, although I’m basically a pantser, I need more plotter qualities to start out with. My character personalities weren’t as defined as I need them to be, and I’m not as in touch with their quirks as I will need to be in the next couple of chapters. I’m learning so much from doing this exercise in such a short amount of time. I’m so glad I signed up for it. I’m enjoying writing fiction more than I thought I would. (I’ve been a non-fiction writer to this point). But I guess it all comes down to the finished product, right? Now, for those of you who’ve been following the saga of the missing question mark – it came back this morning! How, you ask? I don’t have a logical explanation; therefore I’m going with divine intervention. God knows my limits 🙂 I hope you have a good night’s sleep and happy dreams. Word count up to 8,000. Till tomorrow…

 

NaNoWriMo Day 5

Where's My ?
Where’s My ?

Day 5 My keyboard is still not fixed. My friend, the social media expert for my writing group, showed me on her keyboard what to change. The problem is, my keyboard doesn‘t look at all like hers. Hers is probably newer. We‘re great believers here that if something is broken you only replace it if it can‘t be fixed. Well, knickers to that! I may just buy a new keyboard to save my frayed nerves. However, my son did figure out somehow that if I press shift and 6 I get a ? Ta-da! So I‘m getting a badge at least from all this (insert expressive word here) bother – Thank you, Ben, for helping me with my noveling 🙂 Now how do I fix the need to press Ctrl plus the quotation key and press it twice to get a ‘ ? Forget it -I‘m buying a new keyboard! And my novel is taking on a life of its own. It keeps changing what I wrote in the outline. I‘m not sure it‘s flowing right and I‘m highlighting things that may need revision later. I‘ve come to realize I need to observe life more. Plodding on. Total word count with all this messing around – only 6152 – way behind. Looks like I‘ll be working late nights and most of Saturday. Plod on beautiful Plotters and Pantsers! 🙂

NaNoWriMo Day 4

Trout
Trout

Day 4 Still haven`t figured out how to change my É to a question mark! I looked it up in `help` and also online. Other people said it helped them – not me. I`m going to have a lot of editing to do when I`m finished! I took a lovely walk outside when I had my break today. I was in a t-shirt on November 4th – bliss. We have huge fish swimming upstream! Not an easy task. We have sections where the river is about six feet deep and has a fast current. Other parts are shallow with rapids. The poor fish. I`m not sure what they are. We used to think they were trout, but these guys are huge. I took videos of them to send out a query, but uploading them to Facebook was taking too much time away from my novel. Hey, do I get a badge for procrastinating by fish (insert your own question mark here, please). Still need to catch up a bit with word count, but I got my 5,000 word badge today – wahoo! Have a good sleep everyone  🙂

Lynne

NaNoWriMo Day 3

What The Heck ?
What The Heck?

Day 3 Ok, here comes the first challenge! I was working away nicely this evening – trying to catch up on my word count and telling my inner-editor where to go – when my cat sat on my laptop. She has a place on top of a set of drawers beside me, with a comfy blanket because she likes to be near me when I write. J She`ll walk across the keyboard once in a while vying for attention, which I gladly give. Occasionally, she`ll try to lie over my shoulder with her butt on the keyboard because I`m not giving her my undivided attention. She did this tonight and now my keyboard is switching my question marks to a French É – see, I just typed a question mark! My son told me it`s an alternate function of that special key, but he doesn`t know how to fix it. So I had to continue typing away without question marks until I can ask my IT son-in-law in the morning! Silly kitty. Anyway, now I`m beat, so I`ll pass my 5,000 mark tomorrow (only 746 words to go). Take away from my experience todayÉ (argh!), pet the kitty before I start work then move my laptop to the sun room! See you tomorrow!

PS – When I transferred my blog from Word to WordPress I tried my ? key and – as you can see – it worked! Crazy things computers.

NaNoWriMo – Survival Notes

NaNoWriMo Daily Notes on Progress – or lack thereof!

NaNoWriMo Day 1
NaNoWriMo Day 1

So this is my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I decided to blog about the experience so you can make an educated decision if you’re thinking about doing it next year. And no – I don’t use a typewriter, but I liked the image and it was free. Here goes:

Day 1 It had to start on a Sunday, didn’t it?! I had decided to take Sundays off so I could go to church and visit family who I wouldn’t see otherwise because they work full-time. So here I was gearing up for the big event – my first NaNoWriMo – and I wasn’t even going to write on day 1! Fortunately, it was Daylight Savings Time and we turned the clocks back an hour, but not till 2am. So – aspiring to be a fringe fiction novelist – I figured out that the time between midnight on the Saturday and 2am on the Sunday, when the time officially changed, was no-woman’s land and up for grabs. I grabbed it and wrote furiously for two hours. I had to tell my inner-editor to pipe down several times, but I did manage 633 words – Wahoo!!! I need to catch up a bit tomorrow, on writing and sleeping, but writing a little more for six days should keep me on track. Fiction is a lot harder than Faction. (Oh dear, I seem to be losing the ability to find the right words. Bedtime).

Day 2 I started late because my son had a craving for French toast with cheese – a delicacy he came up with while at a restaurant yesterday. The chef wouldn’t cook one for him so he’d been wanting one ever since. Two French toasts with cheese later I set to writing. I already had 633 written from the Twilight Zone time of Saturday night, so I was feeling confident. “Just write away – don’t edit!” is what we’re told. Just get the 50,000 words written in abandon. Edit January and February. Ok by me, but sooooo difficult to do once you’re a writer. I also had to take time out to do my gardening responsibilities which I had procrastinated. So, with 15mins to spare before dinner had to go in the oven, I finished my word count for the day! Sweet bliss. Of course, I have no idea what I’m writing next, just a rough outline of start-middle-end. So I took some time tonight to research names for my antagonist. Yes, I’m learning all the big writing words so I know what people in the forums are talking about. See you tomorrow!