NaNoWriMo 2017

Ahh, it's that time of the year again. The leaves are changing color (if you live somewhere with seasons), and the air is getting colder (a little), so you know what that means? It's time for $1 daily tea at my local coffee shop!
And also NaNoWriMo.
So find some good writing music, grab a favorite drink, and join us for fun and frustration as we write 50,000 words in one month.
You can do it!

Sigh... I really want to do this, but work is going to be so stressful through the end of the year because of deadlines. I'm afraid committing to this would just do more harm than good.

I'm in again this year as well - I finally did some prep work and feel I have a good story to tell. Let me know your username Taharka and I'll friend you up!

@ Wembley - FWIW most people don't finish and I doubt that I'll probably hit 50K. If there's a project you've been sitting on it's always a great excuse to write.

jdzappa wrote:

I'm in again this year as well - I finally did some prep work and feel I have a good story to tell. Let me know your username Taharka and I'll friend you up!

My username for NaNo is the same as my GWJ name, Taharka

Yeah, I'm in. NaNoName is PaleoGamer...

Last year was my best year yet. I actually finished what I was working on and now have beta readers looking at it. Hoping to have a good year this year too.

lol, i'm not even going to fool myself into thinking I'll remotely have the time for this, this year, even if I wasn't already writing x-thousand words for various essay's and reports

Yeah... Hopefully I'll use this as inspiration to journal more this year or maybe pump out a couple short stories.

I'll be cheering on those of you participating this year!

Don't do it!

...

Good luck to everyone!

Ok added tanstaafl and Taharka to my buddy list. I'm going by my real name John DeWeese as next year I'm hoping to launch my fiction career in earnest.

Good luck and good word hunting all!

I registered my working title with the site yesterday. Pure hubris, but the delusion is strong this year. Let's see what comes of it. Avoiding too much interactions within the site for now, not sure what social anxiety + performance anxiety might team up to form.

Turns out we might be trying for some writing this year after all! Feel free to add me here and see how we don't follow through!

Made 2126 today, so I'm off to an... acceptable start.

Here's where my words will be appearing, if anyone cares.

My start to NaNo. Made the 1,667 words (and then some)
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/H2Aw26j.jpg)

1500 words, and the dog keeps wanting to go outside, breaking my stride. I got worlds to build, little hound, contain your bladder! Oh my, can it be? He curled up on the couch... perhaps a short reprieve (or he found a quiet spot to pee that I just haven't discovered yet.) Writing to the steady beep beep beep of the Angelcare baby monitor. Diving back in.

My personal goal is a measly 15,000 words. Set the bar low, that way I can maybe, possibly, hit it?

Your goal is 50% higher than mine. Low expectations.

Up to 3800 words and it's time for bed. Was time for bed. Sheesh, time flies when you're writing yourself into a corner because you can't stop re-rationalizing the thing that probably didn't need explaining yet.

I've decided against using one of my old outlines and writing this story by the seat of my pants. This means that I've now set up a scenario, established some basic characters in my narrative, and started the ball rolling towards flinging poo at a high velocity fan. So far I think I've managed to keep my deep background asides to a minimum, but I'm also not allowing my inner editor to surface too often otherwise I'll just stare at the sh*t I've spewed on the page and wonder how I manage to breathe and walk at the same time. But now it is time for me to establish some firm rules that will dictate how my characters respond to this next bit. Echoes from events long ago, that have shaped the way these folks interact with their technology.

Spoiler:

This particular group I'm dealing with is particularly distrustful and have taken, seemingly elaborate, steps to maintain human oversight over remotely triggered processes. Habits and practices passed down over generations have persisted here, at the edge of civilization. The clan operating this mining concern is descended from shipping lane pirates and bandit mercenaries, and recruit from those who need to escape the constant scrutiny of the central authority (Authority). Over the generations the clan leaders had systematically decoupled their station from the imposed black-box communications computer, developed to thwart shipping lane pirates and bandit mercenaries, and slowly built up a dummy reporting system and comms intercept to isolate the Authority Computer and allow them to fudge certain status reports, compliance checks, and sidestep imposed crew amenity rations. Because f*ck the Authority. To enable this kind of disregard of imposed and firmly enforced regulations Duckfart station was established inside a rocky asteroid ring orbiting a binary-pulsar system sandwiched between large gravity wells and at the far side of a dense nebula. The views are gorgeous, the drive there will probably kill you. Duckfart station maintains their status as a legitimate mining concern by abusing their position behind those natural signal firewalls and developing some clever engineering tricks to delay and reverse engineer the comms responses of the Authority Computer and check the boxes, cross the i's and dot the t's required by the aloof governing body. The fact that the system in their mining claim has access to relatively rare metals and elements and no one else had been willing to risk the volatile nature of living under constant radiation bombardment in a field of shrapnel behind an ocean of lightning and charged radioactive dust probably helps to smooth over a few of the protocol violations.
But now that link to their client/employer and the outside world is compromised the crew are coming together to decide what to do. The received instructions would disable the station and the expected reply seems unclear since part of the instructions disable all crew access to external comms. Rations and energy allotments are reduced to a fraction necessary to maintain a healthy human crew. Station protocol violations, such as attempting to exceed rationed consumption are met with indiscriminately lethal consequences... and if their station were running as demanded by the authority, these changes would have been applied without any notification to the commanders or crew. Attempts to contact their nearest neighboring station have failed. Are they dead already? Or was this attack focused only on them? Some ancient vendetta.

I wonder what happens next!

Edit: My internal editor was sobbing as I wrote this and now that I glanced at it again I'm punching him in the neck and leaving this turd unpolished. Save that juice for the master document!

8,400 ish words! That puts me a day ahead, which I'm very glad for.

Participated in a couple of sprints with my local region via something called "Discord." Am now at 7k words and I'm hoping to get another session in later tonight after some cleaning.

At 10k words I am now staring at the largest cohesive creative writing project I've created and while I know it is a mess of incomplete world building and on the spot rationalizations.... I like it. It's letting me write paragraphs I enjoy reading.
We'll fix it in post. For now... Onward!

Currently at 9,823. So I need about 200 to hit on-track. I can do that tonight, right?

Approaching 20k words and this flying by the seat of my pants thing is getting me into trouble. I started writing in first person, and kept it for multiple characters. It's getting tricky and will almost definitely need to be rewritten into third person at some point... but I needed a gimmick to keep myself from doing explanatory asides, and first person seems to be doing that for me.

Ha! From two days behind to 20,144 words!
Thank you, long car trips.
Edit: Where I'm not driving.

Just logged 22k words. It's messy, it's going to need some major rewrites to be anything but a hot mess, too much of it is in first person. Okay all of it. All of it is in first person right now. Multiple characters that will meet at some point and interact in the same space... all currently in first person. This. Will. Go. Well!

Edit: And I just realized I said pretty much the same thing yesterday. Huh. really hope I'm not doing this in the story. That would be awkward.

Okay kids, we're at the half-way mark. I just realized that the Thanksgiving break is coming up and all of my writing buffer has been chewed up by taking care of a sick toddler. I'm currently at just over the target for minimum wordcount, so I'll need a few good sessions to build up my buffer for those days where I may not be able to write.

Hopefully everyone else is still chugging along! I keep having to remind myself that it's not about quality. First draft! First draft! Make the leaps, ignore the gaps, break the laws of space and physics, ignore the inconsistencies and just have fun.

28,377 words! My goal for this weekend is an extra 10,000 words. We'll see!

That's fantastic!
I'm sitting at 27,300 and I sorely need to get at least another 600 before crashing. My blinks are getting longer and longer and listening to old Dieselboy mixtapes is turning out to be a lot more soothing than I was expecting.

Edit: nope. I will need to settle for 27,500 brain is starting to blink and type gibberish when i'm not looking. G'night!

7,504 words today, to put me nicely ahead at 35,872 total!

The last few days have left me behind the curve on word totals. I crossed 40k last night, so I am not out of the game, but this will need some focus. I keep agonizing over interactions rather than pushing through. Part of the problem with not having an outline. I'm not really sure exactly how things will develop, but the broad story points have coalesced. I am now at the point where the deeper happenings that have been alluded to will be revealed.

We're down to the wire, kids.
I managed to recover a bit in the last few days and should be crossing the 50k mark tonight.

The best/worst bit? My story is nowhere near finished! These first few dozen pages I have been letting things unfold relatively unguided. My plan is to take my flat Google Doc and slowly feed it into y-writer as I struggle with the idea of keeping some things in first person or zooming out to third across the board.
Tightening up plotpoints, trimming some repetitive exposition, and figuring out where the hell the two dead bodies came from! And maybe researching how decomposition in zero-g would work. With stuff like forced air cycling and filtration systems. Also one of my integral assumptions needs some better rationalizations early on. I had debated making one of the solutions just flipping a lever to 'on' since in the current state it was kind of arbitrary that it would even be off. I should be writing.

Edit: Slow day of work and lots of watching progress bars gave me enough time to sit down and push past 50K in 2-300 word bursts. Tonight I will sit down and read what I have written for the first time. Maybe I should be drunk.