10 Things: To Throw into Your NaNo Novel (A Special NaNoWriMo 10 Things)

I am totally breaking my own rules today by blogging before meeting my writing and editing goals.  In fact, I’m not sure a day has passed that I didn’t break that rule in one way or another.  Naughty.

The first week of National Novel Writing Month has ended.  If you’ve been keeping up with the minimum daily goal of 1,667 words, you should have finished the weekend with nearly 12,000 words.  Don’t worry if you’re not there.  The pressure of the deadline can often inspire a burst of words.  So can getting through the beginning and figuring out where your story is going (if you hadn’t worked that out already, ahem.)

The trouble with the end of the first week, of course, is that the Euphoria of Starting is wearing off, and now we’re all realizing that this is going to be a bit of a slog to get through the murky middle and hit 50,000 words anytime in the next year.  Such is writing.  

One way that we can try to keep the excitement alive is by throwing surprises into the novel now and again.  Call them Challenges, call them tossing Wrenches into the works.  Last night I suggested to @Bego that she set fire to something in her novel.  She giddily reported burning a field.  I love how this can work!

Here are 10 Things you could throw into your novel to shake things up and create interest for you the writer.  You never know, maybe they’ll also actually make your story better. 

These 10 Things were chosen at random from the Tim Horton’s Coffee Can, so you know there is a universal wisdom to them.  Seek not to question the Tim Horton’s Coffee Can.  

10 Things To Toss into Your NaNoWriMo Novel:

1.  Something red

2. A sticky doorknob

3. Someone driving too slow

4. A kiss

5.  A mention of temperature

6. Something/someone smashed (or have a character smash something, Hulk-style)

7. A toenail

8. A game of tug-o-war

9. A Parade

10. A jar of pickles

Bonus: A cup of coffee.  No, wait, maybe that should go in the Writer, not the Novel.

Write hard friends.  I’m at 16,235.  Sound off your count or your favorite Challenge/Wrench in the comments.  

Random Friday in NaNoLand

1. Today’s NaNoWriMo wordcount is 12,954. The one-quarter mark. 

2. Total revision time this week: three hours.  I’m two hours behind in my revision goal, but the day isn’t over!

3. No more lunch food has appeared in my street, but I have a suspect.  Notice that there was no dessert left in the street? No juicebox? I’m guessing that the eight year old living in the house next to the tableau was generating an impromptu art installation with the undesirable portions of his lunch. 

4. We had a Halloween. That’s a Mad Hatter hat from last year, and my shirt say “I’m Under the Thrall of the Dark Prince.” Yep, Lord of the Rings, check. Harry Potter, check. Buffy reference, check. And Sonar X10 got his costume out of The Encyclopedia of Immaturity.  We know how to get our geek on around here.  

Gimli, Harry, Mad Mama, Headless Kid

The Case of the Street Lunch

NaNoWriMo Total Word count: 7764. Revision today: one hour. Goals met.

I heard a rumor that today is National Sandwich Day, so designated because it’s the birthday of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Monty is credited legendarily with creating the modern concept of the Sandwich. 

I love sandwiches. For everyday consumption I’m happy with peanut butter and jelly, but from the deli I love a Reuben. 

Here’s a sandwich mystery for you. 

Monday, I was walking down my street. About halfway down, just before my turn, there was an apple sitting in the middle of the road.  A large, red, intact apple.  It was just sitting there, upright, as if someone had intentionally placed it in the middle of the street.  I thought it was weird, but shrugged and went on.

Tuesday, same time, same place. No sign of the apple, but where the apple had been, there was now a sandwich.  Two slices of white bread with something in between.  I was in the car this time, and from my vantage point I couldn’t identify the filling. The sandwich was not squished or obviously soiled.  It was just sitting there, again, as if someone had intentionally placed it in the middle of the street. 

I wouldn’t lie to you.

So what do you think? Will there be a juicebox in the street today? A packet of fruit snacks? Carrot sticks?

The better answer though, would be why these items have appeared in the middle of our street.  Who is the instigator of this sandwichy enigma? What is YOUR favorite sandwich?

Random Tuesday: Vote-o-wrimo Edition

My brain is twitching with my current work-in-progress, so coherence is more than you should expect today.

Randomly:

1. I voted this morning. Did you?

2. My NaNo wordcount is 5,292. Writing goal met for days 1 and 2. Revising goals are waiting…

3. My copy of the royal portrait of Richard II keeps jumping off the wall. Anyone else having that problem?

4. Sonar X10 and his social studies class have been talking about the electoral process in the lead-up to Election Day.  Yesterday they discussed the candidates for Texas governor, reading about each one.  They made some campaign posters, and today the school will hold a mock gubernatorial election.  So awesome.  At dinner last night when he was telling us all this, we asked him who he plans to vote for. Bill White was his immediate answer.  When asked why, he said there were several things about him that he liked, but if he had to pick one, he liked Bill White’s idea of expanding pre-k programs across the state. We are doing something right. 

5. Partner stumbled upon this poem — “The Look” by Sara Teasdale — the other day, which I really love, especially since he tagged it with the phrase “the ache of potential.”

Now, I have some revising to do. Write hard, friends!

NaNoWriMo Begins!

Note: this post contains a link to the National Novel Writing Month website. At various times during November, the demand on that site is pretty high, so links may take time to load or not load at all.  Be patient or try again later.  

Welcome to November friends. A time when the bluster returns to South Texas and we start to juggle plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. But more importantly, November is the time when tens of thousands of people take leave of their senses and try to write 50,000 words of a novel in a single month!

National Novel Writing Month, Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!

At that website, you can register and post a picture, link up to regional forums and find Wrimos near you, tell us something about you and what you want to write, get a badge for your blog, check out the new and improved nifty statistical tracker.  Then you have to write.  Every day is best, but whenever you can is good too.  As you progress you can enter your word count.  If you enter some new words every day, then you can watch your graph fill up.  If you link up with some writing buddies (I’m Eglentyne over there, so buddy me), then you can cheer for each other, help each other through the misery of dredging up words, and celebrate together when it’s finally over on November 30.  The winners are everyone who achieves a personal goal, but especially those who manage to write at least 50,000 words in a single month.  The prizes are the personal satisfaction of having accomplished something difficult, the joy of sharing that experience with a lot of other people, and any of the stickers, tshirts, or goodies you want to buy in order to support NaNoWriMo.  Read more at the NaNo site about the great programs created by NaNoWriMo and and their parent organization (The Office of Letters and Light) and sibling program (ScriptFrenzy).  

There’s no shame in failing as long as you’ve given it your best shot.  And even if you can’t be a Wrimo, you can sponsor someone who is, you can make a donation to the cause, or you can cheer on those who are answering the call to abandon caution and write like the wind.  

This will be my sixth NaNo.  I’ve been a winner each of the five years I’ve participated, and I can tell you that NaNo is one of my favorite things all year.  Group participation, a deadline, and that nifty word tracker are all amazing motivators to get my butt into the seat and write every day.  

I have two personal goals for NaNo this year.

1. Write 2500 words each day.

2. Spend at least one hour each day revising my NaNo project from 2007.  

I also have some rules for myself.  Ok, just one rule really: no Tweeting, blogging, or Facebooking until my daily goals are met. Full disclosure: I’ve met my writing goal but not my revising goal today, so I blew the rules right out of the chute, but I’m excusing that because I really only decided on the rules and the goals this morning—cutting myself some first day slack.

In order to meet the 50,000 word goal for November, you should try to write at least 1,667 words each day, every day of the month.  That’s what I did in my first NaNo and it worked just fine.  Some days I didn’t write that many words, some days I wrote a lot more.  That was sort of a high-pressure scenario for me, and because of various distractions, I ended up having to pull out a couple of 3,000 and 5,000 word days to squeak out with 1,600 words on November 30, 2005.  The next year I decided to try to write 2,000 words every day, so that I would have some built-in Off Days, for those times when life sucked me out of writing (like Thanksgiving Day or almost any day with a sick kid or a sick me).  This worked much better for me. This year, I’m stepping up the goal to 2500 words, both so that I have more free passes and because I’d like to get down as many words as I can in the month.  I’m only going to use my free days if I really need them, so I’m hoping to hit November 30th with well over 50,000 words and a complete (if completely ugly) draft.  

I’ll put a word count widget in the sidebar in the coming days (only after meeting goals, of course) or you can click through my NaNoWriMo participant badge in the far right column to link through to My NaNo page and see my full statistics.  Better yet, join me in the literary abandon and put some words of your own onto a page.  I’ll be here to cheer for you if you try.