Thursday, October 31, 2013

Gearing up for NaNoWriMo

Today, I'm gearing up for NaNo, which starts tomorrow. I decided that I'm going to focus on completing Book #4 of the Ward Sisters Series, Annie and Josh's story, This Year's Love. It's about halfway to where I like to be for word count. Yes, I know I'm verbose. I like to write and then cut, so with This Year's Love at ~60k, I've still got at least 50k left. The purpose of NaNo is to just get it all out there, so my goal is to have this story 100% drafted by the end of November.

Strangely enough, though this is Book #4, I realized that I need to write it before I write Book #3.5, Buying the Cow, which is a novella about Josh's best friend, Eddie Besson. The timeline actually overlaps This Year's Love, and I know where it starts and where it ends, but I have to fill in the middle. Well, the middle will be impacted by what happens in This Year's Love, so it just makes more sense to write that now. And Book #3, Right Here Waiting, is too close to completion for NaNo.

I've been reading Kristen Lamb's Blog entries about getting ready for NaNo, and one of the things she talks about is feeding your muse. With this book, I've already written part of it, so I've done a fair bit of research. It's also part of a series, so there is connection to the other stories. And then there is my writing method, which, when I'm in the zone and writing 8-10k words each day (yes, I can do that, I really can! I type faster than I write and talk), I work best if I've got a soundtrack playing. Not in my head, literally in my ears. So, one thing I'll do today is beef up the This Year's Love playlist on Spotify. One of the things I love about using Spotify is that I can go from my desktop to my laptop and I don't have to do anything special to access the playlist. Love it. Anyway, this book hasn't been a priority, so its playlist is pretty shallow. That'll have to change.


As I said in yesterday's post, NaNo sets the writer up to average about 1,700 words/day to meet the goal. Since I have this marketing class and I'm editing Only One and I need to polish something for Pitch Wars and oh, yeah, I have kids and a husband and a job as caregiver/housekeeper/cook/CFO, I probably can't devote all my time to banging out This Year's Love in just a few short days, thus, completing NaNo in a week. Which is fine; I'm not doing this because I haven't disciplined myself to write every day. I write. Every day. Not always on any one thing, but I do it every.single.day. I have to write. It drives me nuts if I don't and the days we went camping this summer and I had to be unplugged, I wanted to tear my hair out because I couldn't sit with a cup of coffee and write first thing. I won't have trouble meeting the goal. But I'll need to be more rigid about my non-writing activities. Priorities, people.

Thus, I might be a little less present on Facebook and Twitter (I know, you're all so sad). And I'm thinking I need to examine what's on my DVR and decide what can be ditched or watched online instead. Writing, class and my family will have to take precedence over reading, TV and social networking this month. It's all good; I'm sure I won't be 100% absent from any one thing, but you have to do what it takes!

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