NaNoWriMo 2010

I've signed up for my third year of the madness.

Go to nanowrimo.org to follow suit.

NaNo mid-month report

NaNoWriMo has been going well - I passed the 50K threshold last week, on 11th November, and 75K yesterday. I've gone down with a bad cold, which I am blaming for the deathless prose with which I ended a marathon typing session on Sunday night: "It was very involving and she felt very involved." You read it here first. In fact, you won't read it anywhere else as I fixed it the next morning.

My story is much more tightly plotted than last year's, and being set in contemporary Britain there is less scope for vague hand-waving about society, technology, or other potential setting problems. I have been pleased to discover that my characters can still turn around and surprise me by wandering off where I least expect it, meeting new people, and having ideas of their own.

One of the people I have persuaded to sign up is going great guns and appears to be enjoying the experience, finding it freeing and fun. It has been awesome, I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone interested in exploring their creativity or freeing up their writing.

Nearly NaNo

NaNoWriMo starts at midnight tomorrow. I'm ready (extra stocks of tea laid on, plot points, character profiles, imagery and random incidents to sprinkle in as necessary) and excited!

I'm also working on a small panel painting, a Madonna and Child, where I've reinterpreted the traditional imagery by having a newborn baby rather than the typical toddler. Drying times being what they are(n't) at this time of year, I'm getting an hour or so done and then having to wait a day or two. Given that I want to reproduce this as a Christmas card, and the craft fair season is almost upon us, I wish it would hurry up. Having thousands of words a day to write should distract me from watching paint dry, anyway.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo 09 - drawings

(If you don't know what this NaNo thing is, and you want to, click on the strange machine in the sidebar.)

I'm getting ready for November. Since I have been drawing more recently, as well as writing, I have some sketches towards my "book cover" - NaNo allows participants to upload information about their proposed fiction, including an image.

My story is going to involve someone who already grows fruit and vegetables getting back into painting and drawing despite not having done any for years, so as part of the cover image, I will be using an apple pie and drawing of apples.

The apples are James Grieves and came from a friend's orchard. They are a delicious apple variety which can be eaten raw or cooked, but they are not available in supermarkets as they bruise too easily during transport.




The drawing is approx A2 size in conte crayon. They are also an interesting apple to draw as their skin varies from very plain yellow-green to highly coloured with red and orange blushes and stripes.



The full cover image has a working title - it's a satire on the happily-ever-after Aga (TM) saga, hence the general theme of "That which does not kill you can really scratch the enamel on your Aga." The image is one more hook on which to hang your preparatory ideas, alongside plot plans, character sketches (words or pictures) and other design material.

Writing fiction again

I came across a batch of writing I'd abandoned months ago - the first piece I started writing last year, which was about two-thirds novel length when I put it aside to do NaNoWriMo and the OU writing course. I was thinking I really ought to get around to continuing, some time, especially as I hadn't written much else since the OU course finished in May. That night, I got a set of ideas for NaNo '09 (whilst I was trying to get some sleep before it got light outside again, naturally..) so the next day I started a set of notes for those and then picked up the first novel again.

It's part of my series on a post-ecological collapse dystopia. This story takes place many hundred years in the future, and a couple of hundred years after the civil war that formed my NaNo '08 novel. My plan at the moment is to write all these pieces, probably a trilogy but maybe four of them, in first draft, and then edit the first one. Which is really either the second one, because I started it second, or the third, because I only have ten thousand words for it so far and it will be finished third.

As part of the OU course, I had to write a very short item in a factual style, and then again from the point of view of one of the protagonists. The incident I made up was a fatal car crash. My NaNo idea is to take this as a starting point of a novel narrated by the man who was at home when his wife died in the car. One of its themes will be the reality of country living versus the Sunday supplements or the Aga saga romantic novel treatment. I grew up in the country myself, and have a very jaded view of it because of some major incidents (think Cold Comfort Farm but not played for laughs).

I now have a mixture of plot outline, character notes and so on for NaNo, which is plenty for this time of year, especially considering that this time last year I hadn't even heard of NaNo. I am designing a book cover image - just for fun, as an exercise in imagery, and because they can be uploaded to your book notes in your NaNo profile. A friend gave me some home-grown apples, which I needed for an image - the narrator will be making watercolour sketches of them in a notebook, so I was going to do that myself. She very kindly left some of the leaves and twigs on. I also made an apple pie with some of the extra ones, being a bit busy today with conte pastel drawings of sunflowers and plums to do the apples as well.

And so it begins

Today is the first day of NaNoWriMo. Last night I was waiting for midnight with a blank page in front of me, ready to type my opening line. An hour and a couple of thousand words later, I went to bed feeling pleased and also wondering what I had let myself in for. This morning I woke up with an idea about how to change the narration of my "novel" (novella? novelette? screed?) and now I am taking a break having reached six thousand words, more than I had imagined. No aching wrists, sore eyes etc. - I guess because I am used to writing, just not in these quantities on one thing. 

It's a strange idea, and it remains to be seen whether it really works for me or not. At the moment I am very optimistic, which is a good thing seeing as I have another 44K and 29 and a bit days to go with this odd challenge. There's a good atmosphere online in the comprehensive but slow-loading forums; I am not sure what genre I will turn out to be writing in, but small matters like that can wait.

I am signed up for NaNoWriMo 08 - a challenge to write 50,000 words in one month, starting November. The graphic above is my attempt at a banner to summarise some themes from my project.

I only hesitated for a few days before joining, although I only started writing fiction "accidentally" about six months ago and have never written anything like that much in one month. I am hoping this is going to stretch me and my writing, help me commit to some writing (almost) every day, reawaken my creativity, that kind of thing. When I signed up, I had no idea what I would write. At the moment I have two different stories in my head and on my computer about a dystopian future after an ecological and social catastrophe. One of these is a lot more developed than the other, but neither is anywhere near finished even in first draft.

So far, I have written by accumulating scenes as they come to me, with the occasional set of background notes as I think out some issue in my made-up societies, so to look in these NaNoWriMo forums (I nearly typed "fora" but I guess that's way too pretentious) and see advice about outlining and knowing where your plot is going before you start is a whole new way of doing things. To write that much in that short a timespan, I think I am going to have to have more idea about where I am going on a daily basis.