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NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. One month, 50,000 words, caffeine, smidges of insanity, and absolute fun rolled into one.

2003 - NaNo Journal

1 November 2003 [1624 words]
Well my first entry was quite incoherent for I was too overcome with excitement to post anything longer than an one sentence entry typed merely to reserve space for this longer entry. (Oh dear, NaNo already has affected me...)

It's almost one-and-a-half hours in and I've done 1624 words. Not bad for a night's work. I'll sleep now and resume work first thing tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll even get around to introducing my main character!

1 November 2003 [7285 words]
I've just realized: the main character is mentioned twice in the first 5000 words, but he never actually appears until his birth (around the 5500th word). And the second main character has yet to be born. I'm really stretching this on and on. I've ended it tonight with Master Wizard Oft about to recite the history of Raenor, Ryt, and Ryst. Nothing like a good ol' history lesson smack dab in the middle of an assassination attempt, eh?

Not much happened in the 6000 words that I churned out today. However my first main character has been born and the second will be born soon. I've set up some of the backstory and there's been an assassination attempt and a handful of extraordinarily "I'm going to puke" romance scenes.

2 November 2003 [11138 words]
I have determined that I am 22% done for word count, but the story is merely 5% told. Perhaps I have gone overboard with extraneous scenes? But it doesn't matter. Trimming down the novel is what NaNoEdMo is for. I've got half a mind to remove the 'backspace' and 'delete' buttons from my keyboard. Must resist the temptation...

Must also find my plot. It seems to have disappeared on me. My minor characters are stealing the show and my two main characters are sitting around twiddling their thumbs. *sigh* Anyone else experiencing the problem of having adamant characters defying carefully planned outlines?

3 November 2006 [12634 words]
From what I've read on other NaNo journals, today seems to have been slow for everyone. I blame it on the fact that it's the first weekday of NaNo and suddenly, we're all at jobs and school and exhausted by the time we return home. Plus, it's a Monday and Mondays are notorious for being slow. I remain optimistic that things will pick up tomorrow.

No excerpt tonight because everything I've churned out today (a pitiful 1500 words) is absolute rubbish. -.-

On the other hand, I have dragged myself out of an extraordinarily painful character development scene and may now move on to the 'rising action' of my plot. With one minor problem. My plot still has not returned. *falls to knees and begs* Please come back, plot. Please?!

4 November 2006 [14049 words]
I wouldn't let myself quit until I passed the 14,000 mark. *sigh* Now I'm tired and still have some homework to complete ere before I collapse in my bed. Writing on weekdays is so difficult. But I'm too tired to really rant about it.

My characters are changing so rapidly and although Kale was kind enough to catch my plot for me *grin*, my plot seems to have morphed. I already know how I'll be spending the first ten or so hours of NaNoEdMo: revising my first few chapters to suit my new plot.

I present an excerpt today on the plot-changing scene. Perhaps I won't need the King of Ryst at all. The two brothers are doing a fine enough job building tension without the whole messy concept of an epic war. Although the war is rather tempting as it would swallow up a great deal of words. *contemplates*

5 November 2006 [15278 words]
It has become increasingly difficult to crank out the minimum word count of 1000 for weekdays. My mind just cannot write after spending a day being bombarded with information at school. I will be glad when the weekend arrives and I'll have more time to think about my novel. I have been changing my working title a lot as I mess around with various plot ideas. I've decided to just let my characters direct the action and I'll smooth over the problems during EdMo. ^.^

6 November 2006 [16528 words]
At first the writing process was slow and crummy, but then inspiration struck me: to use one of my dares. More specifically, the "Secret Code" one by jacay. "I dare you to spell out a secret message using the first letter/word of each sentence/paragraph." It got me going and wound up turning into a 1535 (and counting!) argument between Oft and Nyor. Hooyah to dares.

I have many plans for tomorrow's writing and am thrilled to announce that I feel like I have a sense of direction in my novel again. Perhaps tomorrow I will make up for all the lost words of this past week. I remain hopeful.

7 November 2006 [18307 words]
Considering how I've only had three hours to write today, my progress has been fairly sweet. The plot is just beginning to get interesting, my first character is about to die...although technically, he/she already has, only nobody knows of it yet. The joys of third-person limited. :)

I've also been working on an outline of all that I've written so far, sort of a summary of each chapter. It has really been helping me stay focused. Instead of plowing through random sentences of earlier chapters, I just skim over the summary.

I still cannot believe that just a WEEK ago I started NaNoWriMo. It feels like it has been ages. What was life without NaNo like? Suddenly I can't remember...

8 November 2006 [20,878 words]
21,000 is so tempting, but I'm spent for the night. It's been a long day...and a fairly long night. I watched The Matrix Revolutions tonight. Let's just say I didn't understand most of it. =) Perhaps it is because I didn't watch The Matrix Reloaded and the third movie picked up right where the second ended, with no explanation whatsoever. On the plus side, the special effects were awesome to watch and my enthusiasm for Return of the King has been piqued. Unfortunately my enthusiasm for writing has waned. I didn't get the word count I'd been hoping for (especially since last weekend was so productive), but I did make progress on my plot.

9 November 2006 [21145 words]
Wow. I churned out less than 400 words today. Go me. But can I truly be blamed because my room needed to be vacuumed and dusted? We must not forget that I had to create two new layouts, start a new fic, and organize all my papers from last year.

Oh what the heck. I procrastinated like mad today. =P It's not so much that I left off at a bad spot. In fact my novel is just about to get interesting. But I needed a day off from writing. Thank goodness for it; I feel refreshed now and ready to get started on Chapter VII. But. Tomorrow. I. Will. Break. 23,000. Words.

10 November 2006 [23221 words] I've met my assigned goal for the day. Tomorrow, I plan to break 26K. I will have most of the day to write, although a great deal of it will be spent finishing up homework, especially my despicable "Lord of the Flies" essay. (I spent about ten minutes today mulling over whether or not I could somehow incorporate my LOTF essay into my novel...)

The plot is advancing along nicely now. I think I'll just breeze over the funeral (I've never been good at capturing the emotions of death scenes) and then move onto the next step of my plot: getting Nyor into the Darkened Lands and the Aerloth to begin his training as a wizard. But then, what should I do with Baryn and Taer back at the capital? Perhaps the King of Ryt will somehow work his way back into it. I did spend time working on fleshing out his character and I'd hate for him to not even make an appearance!

11 November 2006 [27402 words]
Wow. That's all I can say about today. It felt truly fantastic, to be just writing and having ideas flowing...it felt like the first weekend again, when I was cranking out 5000 words a day. Plus, I actually like some of the stuff I wrote today. Sure it's still crap, but now it's almost coherent crap.

12 November 2006 [30,474 words]
I remember this time last year I posted a message in the forum stating "THIS IS HELL WEEK!" complete with a long rant about how I'd spent three hours typing a measly 700 words. I hope I don't jinx myelf by saying this, but this year, the second week of NaNo is flowing smoothly, despite the load of homework. ^.^

Originally, I was going to stop at 29K, but then I accepted a challenge on the forums to type 500 words in 10 minutes. That pushed me to 29,336 and I just kept going after that. My characters babbled quite a bit about their views on the ethics of magic. Reminded me of some of the conversations at the UJO forums. ;)

14 November 2006 [33,581 words]
I didn't update yesterday. In fact, I wrote 0 words yesterday. Didn't even open up Microsoft Word, except to type my translation of Act I of "Julius Caesar". ^.^ There must be a conspiracy out there. The moment my NaNo novel starts picking up, the homework just piles up.

But despite the homework, there's something I'm quite excited about. I wrote a 4500+ word scene. I have never done that before in my life; most of my fics are less than 4500 words! But the dialogue kept flowing, my characters kept chatting, and so the scene just dragged on and on. It helped that I used the "and there was much rejoicing" dare in there. ^.^ The words "And there was much rejoicing" are at the end of virtually every paragraph in the middle of that scene.

15 November 2006 [35,172 words]
Well there wasn't much time for writing today and currently I'm stuck at one of those crawling scenes that are needed just to connect ideas together. Ho hum. And after I pull myself from this painful scene, I have scheduled a scene where everybody sits down and discusses exactly what they are going to do next. I'm considering skipping ahead of both the scenes and diving straight into my climax.

So because I was so bored and needed to procrastinate, I made the mistake of reading over some previous chapters. Big mistake there! Let's just say I found some interesting sentences:

"Leather boots adorned his feet and loose colored pants hung over them." My English teacher would throw a fit over that sentence. -.-

"Oft could not tell if Nyor was being sarcastic, insulting, grateful, worshipful, complimentary, loving, or a combination of all seven." Word padding, baby. Pity I miscounted the number of adjectives I used. *sweatdrops*

"Nyor looked as if he had just heard that the Nuramar River was really a stream of tears from the goddess Arya or a piss of urine from the god Essan." I'm not even going to start with this one...

Conclusion? Reading over old chapters is highly entertaining, if a bit depressing. Now a mental note to self: edit those sentences during NaNoEdMo.

16 November 2006 [37,253 words]
I seem to have acquired a problem. I cannot break up my writing anymore. Ever since I 'discovered' how to lengthen my chapters to 3000+ words, I cannot find a suitable place to break. My characters keep wanting to rant on and on...and it's not quite a problem for WriMo, but when EdMo swings around, I shudder to think of all the extraneous scenes I'll need to cut.

My characters just held a 1000 word conversation on how the wizarding school is run. *sweatdrops* Was it even remotely related to my plot? Nope. I've completely given up on my original plot. Now, I'm just letting my characters run with it. Hopefully they'll start doing something worth reading about. Perhaps they'll incorporate the King of Ryst in there. I always was fond of his character...

17 November 2006 [41,284 words] Even now, as my eyes struggle to stay open and the computer monitor looks like a glowing and very blurry thing, I cannot believe I managed 4000 words. On a weekday. On a Monday. The words weren't exactly 'flowing' today, but I just refused to let my fingers stop typing. It drained me to a point of creative exhaustion, but looking at my word count somehow makes all the pain worth it.

Plus I've finally reached a point in my story where the antagonist can start doing a bit more than sending in random assassins. Not to mention my protagonist has blossomed from a whiny ten-year-old to an uberly sweet and empathetic young man.

Egads, I must be more tired than I thought, if I'm swooning over my main character. *grin*

18 NOvember 2006 [45127 words]
With less than 5K left before 'winning' NaNo, I must say I'm still in a state of shock. Perhaps I cannot believe that I'm so close to the 50K mark just because there's so much left in the story. I've told perhaps...10% of the story. Most likely less than that. There's still quite a ways to go, but I will be forever grateful to NaNo for giving me the boost I needed to start this.

I also thank NaNo for giving me a plot to work with. Yes, I'm 45K in, it's the 18th of November, and a plot has finally come to me. =P It is completely different from my original outline, but none of my characters end up adhering to nice and orderly outlines. My characters are both a blessing and curse.

I'm going to sleep on this tonight, for a major combat scene is approaching and were I to write it tonight, I'd probably end up confusing myself. Note to self: never name two opposing lands with similar names ever again. Ryst and Ryt. Ryt and Ryst. I've confused myself so much. ^.^;; Not a good thing for NaNo, confusing oneself...

19 November 2006 [47448 words]
I suppose I could go on and cross 50K tonight (or early tomorrow morning!), but I'd rather wait for tomorrow. I'm already ahead of myself from last year and potentially failing various quizzes and tests tomorrow isn't worth finishing a few hours earlier. But oh to be so close! It's quite maddening. :) Oh and I'm proud to announce that I have a new most 'interesting' sentence: "But he did not understand why Oft considered silence to be worthy of quiet."

20 November 2006 [51186 words]
*hugs everybody* Hehe, I'm so happy. Now that the complete shock has worn off, an overwhelming sense of relief and excitement has taken over my senses. I'm thrilled. Utterly thrilled. There isn't much more to add today, other than the fact that the last two-thousand were sheer agony, because the finish line was so close and yet all I wanted to do was shut down the computer and go watch some TV. But this feeling made all the pain worth it.

I've also been contemplating a bit on what to do with the rest of the month. I'm tempted to just continue plowing ahead and cranking out words, but I also feel like I need a break from my novel. Perhaps I'll finish my website for my 2002 novel, Subterfuge, and then work on the 2003 NaNo novel website. ^.^ I've missed computer graphics. Ever since NaNo started (and save for three icons and my 'friends-only' icon, I haven't even OPENED Photoshop).

And as ever, the forums are calling. =P

23 November 2006 [52717 words]
Yesterday I wrote absolutely nothing. Today I spent most of my day off the computer, catching up on everything I had put aside for NaNo, including a great deal of studying. So now, I'm refreshed and ready to tackle my novel once more. Computer and keyboard? Check. Plot? Check. Characters? Check? Sanity? Er...

27 November 2006 [~57K]
I have been writing drabbles of the NaNo novel over the past few days but each time, the update was so insignificant that I didn't bother posting the progress on LJ. So after a few days of 50-200 words, I decided to just sit down and type until I cranked out 3000 words. That was around this morning at 4 AM. Lesson of this year: pulling all-nighters with friends does wonders for word count. As a reward, I allowed myself to watch The Two Towers Extended Edition DVD for two hours tonight, during the time I normally would have reserved for writing. =P

30 November 2006 [61653 words]
This is it. The end of NaNo. I'm thrilled that I made the deadline, thrilled that The Runes of Raenor is now the longest thing I have ever written, thrilled that I got part of this story out of my head and onto paper...I thank Chris Baty for making this all possible. I thank my fellow Wrimos for their support and congratulations. I thank my characters for cooperating with me. Lastly, I thank all my friends who coped with my whining and complaining. ^.^

To all the WriMos on LJ: it was an honor to be able to follow your novels and progress. I hope to see you all participating again next year!