Whew! NaNo is complete...

December has arrived and for the third year I have completed NaNoWriMo -- this time with 52,876 words. I even managed to arrive at 'the end!'

Back in '07 I completed NaNo and reached an ending. But once I began editing phase (which for me actually begins in January) I realized the beastie really didn't work. So through '08 I added a bit, tossed aside a bit and by November realized I had to do it again! I also discovered that one of my characters had managed to get herself pregnant along the way. Serves me right for letting her run off on her own!

50 K words later and with a successful NaNo '08 under my belt (so to speak) I had my main characters strewn out across the country and generally had no idea what to do next.

And through '09 I tried to settle and finish it, but every time I thought I had a hook in the beast something unexpected would happen.

And so November arrived....

By that time I knew more or less where things headed (or so I believed) and even spent a good bit of the first day or so working on my time line (a thingee that some people might call an outline).

I tossed a section where a character went into the mountains and and managed to get himself caught in a blizzard (never a good thing) and rerouted him north (things are warmer in the north -- think southern hemisphere). I even managed to rescue a character from having to cross a swamp full of undefined nasties! If I had known more about August in the Louisiana bayou, I might have let them go! Could have been fun.

And things moved along as they always do.

Then about three weeks into NaNO '09 my rerouted character decided he had to go somewhere and the dweeb wandered back into the mountains! Another character went off without his protector and a third decided to do something good by conning every body (an idea which seemed about as bad as any I had managed to come up with).

And all this about 6 or 7 days before I had to wrap this thing up!

Well, somehow it all worked out. A few people paid for their foolishness, more didn't and everybody lived happily ever after -- well, OK, not really, but I did manage to pull a few things together and get to a semblence of an ending.

So, what's my point?

Just this, that if you want to do NaNo or some such enterprise (there's a group who plan to write 5,000 line Epic Poems in May: NEPMo.com, if you're interested) and your characters just won't cooperate then just write what they happen to do at the time. Describing the weather and what a character happens to see off in the distance can buy a few words as well....

Eventually, your character's will drift around to getting where and doing what they ought. Trust the little creeps, they most likely know what they're about better than you do.

And just keep writing....

NaNoWriMo

November 1 approaches and with it another month of NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. In fact this month begins the 11^th year of this (free) enterprise.

I played in ’07 and ’08 and plan to join again this year.

Each year dedicate folks from all over the ‘verse (to steal a phrase from Joss Whedon) write 50,000 words in 30 days. That works out to 1667 words each day. And in the process the goal is to write a story, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end. Many begin, many depart early, but somehow many complete their stories.

Or at least manage to pump out 50K words!

The end result always lacks something, but that’s fine. It’s a first draft!

Most NaNoWriMo folk are pure amateurs (just doing this ‘for the love of the game’), but a few pros crop up every year. They seem to use NaNoWriMo as a tool for cranking out the ‘next one.’

And no one expects to produce perfections. In fact one of the consistent and repeated suggestions to Newbies is to shut off the delete button.

If the word you just used seems wrong… well, just go on, fix it later. When counting words, every word counts.

Most of us remember those assignments in school, the ‘write a 500 word essay on widgets’ kind where we used a lot of padding to get it done. Well, NaNoWriMo allows that sort of thing. We thrive on this!

In fact, this year I intend to finish last year’s story (which, hmm, actually expanded on the first years story…) and then begin another story. And that’s just peachy keen.The only ‘rule’ being: begin at 12:00:01AM on Noverber 1 and finish at 11:59:59PM on November 30.

So, anyway, what I’m saying is that you still have time to link onto www.nanowrimo.org and join in this year. Don’t worry that you don’t have a worked out story-line. If you’ve the urge I suspect you’ve had a bunch of characters running around in your mind for a while (mine go back as far as 1975!), so just let ‘em loose and jot down what they do for the next 50K words or so.

You can always edit things back into shape in December….