NaNoWriMo and Announcements

I came to two conclusions today, and I wanted to share them both with you, because they both play into this blog directly. First off, as you may have noticed if you follow me on twitter (@ajrula) or on Facebook (only if I actually know you, you creepy person!), I have been gearing up for National Novel Writing Month. I take this kind of seriously every year. This year, though, I’m trying to figure out what I’m hoping to get out of NaNoWriMo, and how to most effectively go about that.

First, I want to write. As much as anything, I plan on doing that. Writing is something that I personally feel powerfully about, and I have been ignoring the actual *doing* of it for too long in my life. I want to publish, and the only way to do that is to actually write and finish a novel. I’ve got a bunch of ideas, but haven’t executed them yet. A friend of mine asked me how many novels I have planned, and I was able to list a dozen offhand without any difficulty whatsoever. I’m positive I missed a bunch. None of those are written.

So, I need to write. That’s simple. First off, permanent goal: I will write 1000 words per day, at least. They will be words that are for something. Either a definite writing exercise, or to be put towards a novel. There will be zero deviation from that plan. Every single day. If I miss a day for whatever reason, I will not be permitted to do anything fun until I have made it up, and completed the next day as well. I can’t let myself start to slack on this, or it’ll just fall apart again.

With that decided, my plans for NaNo are going to be designed to acclimate myself to this new work environment. Writing 1667 words per day is easily higher than the 1000 word quota I set for myself, but I feel like I need to shock my system properly to do this right. I’m going to double up, and write two NaNos this month. I plan to do them simultaneously, not one after another. I think that having the option to switch between two different genres (haven’t decided on the stories yet, but they will be different genres) will help me a lot. This is 100k words in 30 days, which ends up being just over 3k words per day. This is a do-able thing. I had good days in the past where I broke 5k. I’m merely ordering myself to do those all the time. Like a wise woman once told me, writer’s block is just an excuse. You beat it by sitting down and writing.

Which brings me to the announcement portion of this post. I don’t think I can handle 3k words of NaNo per day, as well as a blog post every day. I am officially, as of November 1^st, going to an every-other day schedule (which, honestly, is something that I’d always intended to do. This was never intended to be a daily blog, but it turned into one, and I don’t quite mind that.) Once November is over, or if I find that I actually do have the time to write one every day, we’ll move back to the daily schedule.

This is going to require some serious time management, and will likely mean that I’m going to be cutting back on some things – like sleep and food and life. That said, I think it will make me a more productive person, and that will eventually make me waste less time refreshing the page on Facebook and Twitter and MMOChampion.

It’ll be hard, I’m not going delude myself of that, and there’s a good chance that I’m going to fail miserably. To help prevent that, a few people I know are going to have the ability to punish me for slacking off. They know who they are, and I hope they’ll do their job and make me regret slacking off. Deadlines help me.

So, for the TL;DR:

1)      I’m going to every-other-day blog posts starting November 1^st. They will return to daily posts as soon as I feel comfortable doing so, or December 1^st at the latest.

2)      I will write 1000 words of fiction per day, permanently. This begins today.

3)      I will complete 2 different National Novel Writing Month novels. Their titles and genres will be established sometime in the next week. (Since, well, they kind of have to be.)

Wish me luck!