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NaNoWriMo 2011

Oops - I started without really meaning to. Too late now. On with the no-real-plot-just-a-problem writing! So far I've almost mugged my main character, thrown him off a small cliff and jumped 100+ years for some tutoring and robots and riots.

My profile is here if we're doing word wars or anything this year.
 
So, in this month, do we have to come up with everything? Or is it just the month for writing?

Like, let's say I have this awesome idea, but all i have is the idea. Would this be more favorable than having characters and a basic plot planned out? Because if so, I might have one awful month ahead of me. If it's better with more planning, I think I'll save it for next year.
 
This is the month for writing! Just do it now. Don't worry about coherency.
 
Ir's not that I'm worrying about coherency, it's just that things usually don't go so well for me if I don't have some sort of plan for it.
 
Since I lost the past two years' NaNo work, I was totally disheartened! :c buuuuuut because I am a super-great adult I have decided that what my schedule needs is definitely this

Iiii have less than a thousand words so far oh dear. The worst thing is that the last few years came with a decent bit of planning, and last year I edited a bit along the way and everything was sort of pretty together, now that I think about it. I don't really... ... have a plot this year :D? But it'll be good for practice and I guess I'll just have to see if I can make it!!!

It's about a girl who falls in love with her muse! Or something. Also she's a queer ace WOC because the only thing that really inspires me to write these days is doing something that literature would actually need.
 
My fucking laptop decided to bork on me @_@ so I have done no writing today. LUckily I pulled my nano off it earlier today so I still have it on a USB stick but I've wasted so much time trying to get my laptop to work that it seems a little fruitless.

sigh. I guess I'll just have to over-write this weekend!!
 
Okay so I didn't have any time yesterday to work on my actual story and...

I'm twenty-eight words in. I hate you, Terezi, stop being so hard to write! And Karkat too; I wish both of them could just drop dead before the game even starts. I'm just glad Mawile died night one, otherwise I think I would just die.

But still! :(
 
Twilight Sparkle said:
My fucking laptop decided to bork on me @_@ so I have done no writing today.
Click to expand...

Woah, just decided backing up my file would be an excellent idea...

A little bit behind today. But I'm excited about what I'm writing. And I'm also semi-convinced that someone was reading what I was writing over my shoulder today. =D This is okay because the scene I was writing at the time was actually not complete crap.
 
Got tired with writing about nothing in particular and decided to start from the point where one of my characters go batshit insane instead.

Then I skipped around some more, writing random scenes between the middle of the story and the end.

And off of a sudden, I have the most amazing ending ever. It's exactly what I wanted, even though it means my story just got chopped in half and what was supposed to be a line in the middle of my story just became the end.

But it's so amazing I don't care about it anymore.

I am suddenly feeling much better about my story.

See, this is why you don't plan out your story down to the last detail because cool stuff like this happen.
 
Sandstone-Shadow said:
Woah, just decided backing up my file would be an excellent idea...
Click to expand...

Oh right. I almost forgot to post this from my handy-dandy-never-going-to-be-finished-NaNo-guide again:

Back up your novel. Then back it up again. Then back it up again somewhere else.

There is a "National Back Up Your Novel Day" (Nov 3rd, I think?) just so everyone on nanowrimo.com can belabor you with the importance of backing up your novel. But every day should be "National Back Up Your Novel Day". Yeah, you think I'm kidding, but I'm not. Plenty of people on TCoD alone (myself included) can tell you stories about how they lost/almost lost a significant amount of progress due to technological failure, theft, things being misplaced and more. Backing your novel up multiple times, as well as backing it up in more than one location, is an effective way to prevent this. You'll be glad you did later, trust me.

Start by looking at the program you're using to write your novel. Most modern word processors have an automatic backup function you can turn on that will automatically save a backup file of your work every so often. Other popular programs probably have a similar option somewhere, so take the time to look for it/ask someone where it is. Next, manually save your file to at least one other location that is not the folder you normally keep it in. You can do something as simple as copy it to another folder somewhere on your computer, but the best option is saving it in another location entirely. If you have a flash drive or external hard drive, save a copy there. Email it to yourself (probably as an attachment rather than pasting it into an email, just to preserve formatting). Save copies to Google Docs or something like it (if you aren't writing there already; even then, it doesn't hurt to find some other way to save it). You might even want to look at getting a free account with someplace like Dropbox or Mozy or Ubuntu One, which gives you some online storage space to back things up and should be generally useful for other things outside of NaNo anyway.

Wherever you back it up, do it often. I have a Google Docs folder specifically for my NaNo, and at the end of the day I copy and paste my entire story into a new document in that folder. You may not want to save the whole thing every day like I do, but you should back your novel up in some way, shape or form at least twice a week, if not more often than that.
Click to expand...

At least one person on TCoD has managed to lose at least part of their story every year iirc. Trufax. Don't be that one person. Always back up your shit, mkay kiddies?

Iiiiii am actually not doing NaNo this year! The last three years were a blast, and as I said my school schedule/assignments are not as effing ridiculous as they were last November, but I'm just not feeling it this year. There's other stuff I'd like to try and take care of rather than trying to keep up with my word count and making my poor oldperson hands hurt more than they already do. I will see what I can do about revising last year's story (just revising it, not necessarily trying to hit a certain wordcount's worth of revisions), though! God damn it but I need to actually get that done. :(

I'll probably jump back in next year! But until then I will be here cheering all of you guys on! :D Go go go TCoD write your novels goooooo

(And back them up. For serious.)
 
:^( I did back it up!! That's why I have it at all, haha. But bluh I was busy today so I didn't have any time to write and now I need to write like 3k to just be on target.
 
:^( I did back it up!! That's why I have it at all, haha. But bluh I was busy today so I didn't have any time to write and now I need to write like 3k to just be on target.
 
I'm soooo screwed. I did not get done the planning I had planned to get done. All I have is some dusty obsolete outlines from about a year ago or longer and an almost as old first chapter which I will have to rewrite.

The problem is, I need to somehow complete worldbuilding my utopia. The basis of my story is that 3 kids are transported in a different world when they fall asleep and have to kind of solve a big puzzle involving 7 towns to find out what's going on, and then somehow stop the bad guy that found his way to that world first and wants to use this ability to steal knowledge from utopia. I've been thinking a lot recently and pretty much have down the metaphysics I'm going to use to get them to a planet light years away, plus a loose sketch of each of the towns. And I pretty much know how my utopia functions. I just have to come up with a big metapuzzle connecting all the towns for my characters to solve, which seems pretty crucial to the plot to say the least.

I really couldn't have written anything so far anyways because I have been unusually busy for the last couple days, and I'm going to a concert in an hour.

tldr; Aaaagh I haven't started yet and I don't completely understand the original world I'm putting my characters in.
 
Yeah, um, apparently my main character is having prophetic visions now. I don't even know how that happened but she had a trippy dream sequence where the sky was on fire and the grass was bleeding and then she saw the end of the world.

or it was just a dream.
 
I managed to clear 2k in about two and a half hours?? I don't know how THAT happened but I'm just going to

take it and go.
 
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