NaNo Madness and its Cohorts (by sarah)
I am planning on doing NaNoWriMo again this year - this is National Novel Writing Month - the challenge? To write 50, 000 words in a month - what is being termed a novel but I would consider a novella!
I did this last year and finished with more than 60 K words and met some great people who became my friends 🙂 Local and internationally. Unfortunatly I have already missed the launch parties but hope to be able to get along to a few write-ins (meet ups in coffee shops where you appear with laptops and dare each other to write or alternatively just chat!).
I plan to finish/continue the story I started last year which is slightly cheating but as I view this as my writing goal for the month - I think that's ok. You can follow my progress on Purple Monster - were I keep all my notes, reviews of research material, and raw as I write them chapters of the story! I often bung in the odd writing tip or link to an interesting article. There are a few flash fictions that are based in The Punks universe though at a slightly earlier time period, these can be found on Magenta Monster.
I was going to carry on writing the story all the way through last year but even towards the end of November last year I started having issues with simply not knowing enough about the time period half the novel is set in - ie Tudor England. I have spent alot of time reading history books and I got away with taking over our LoveFilm queue for half the year where I got out all the films and documentories based in the time period I could find. (And yes I know the films are not accurate but sometimes they give you something to go and research!).
As I am also using some alternative tech in the story I have been researching this too - namely optronics and what large scale social computing would be like if centralised and not the internet. Half the story is set in the near future and is basically cyber punk so I have been reading my way through the cyber punk novels we have in the house.
I want to beat last years word count 🙂 But being pregnant and stuff means that this may be tricky - I am however still going to try.
The other challenge I am doing is PiBoIdMo (Picture Book Idea Month) which I also did last year - this makes a nice counter balance to the Nano for me. And as I have had a great reaction from Jean from stories that came out of this and the picture book writing week - I am definatly doing this again! I am keeping track of all this stuff on Orange Monster if anyone is interested!
I am also doing the rewrite of a novel I hope to submit to the Terry Pratchette Prize so all in all that is a lot of work and I am aware I probably will not get it all done especially with my hands acting up the way they are - but I can but try. And at the end of the day anything I get done is a bonus 🙂
Mon 1st Nov 2010 12:03 pm 
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By Tara, Mon 1st Nov 2010 @ 2:42 pm
Wow, you have a challenging month ahead! Good luck with NaNo, PiMo and ReWriMo (??) LOL!
By sarah, Tue 2nd Nov 2010 @ 3:02 pm
Thanks 🙂 It's going well so far but then it is only the second day 🙂