My Thoughts on NaNoWriMo

There’s 6 days to go until NaNoWriMo kicks off. I think that by this time last year I’d made 2 or 3 posts about it already. Part of this was just the sheer excitement of having found such a new challenging thing. Another part was that I never really thought about what I’d post each week. This year not so much, I’ve been focused on outlining and editing and writing The Feral Diaries and RoW80. As a result I’ve barely thought about blogging about NaNo.

I thought I’d talk about it at last. I learnt this week that I’m being put on Work Placement with the JobCentre. This means that for the first time I’ll be really learning whether I can handle writing and working full time. The last time I worked I’d just finished writing The Darkling Watch and was taking a break after the intensity of NaNoWriMo. It will be a new experience for me, writing with NaNo at the same time as working 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. I’m considering it an experiment at living in the real world.

My NaNo this year is again drawing on Norse mythology but it’s focused more on the Young Adult market. I’m considering putting it up on Amazon once it’s finished and edited to the point I’m happy with it but if I don’t it won’t be the end of the world. I have ended up spending too much time on the NaNo forums, particularly in the dares thread. As a result my outline is now full of strange events and quirky characters. There is a chance I’ll have to take them out once I’m editing but there’s also a chance those dares will make it funnier and more interesting than I could ever hope.

My outlining has been very in-depth. It’s overly complicated but it works for me. First I outlined the novel as a whole. Then I went through the outline, breaking it up chapter by chapter. Then I outlined each chapter in more depth before separating out each scene. I’ve got a whole 31 chapters and an epilogue done like this so far. Now I’m going through with each scene and going into detail with each of them. I’ve also tried to get a better grip on my characters by interviewing them as well as doing character sheets. It seems to be working actually.

With so much detail going into my planning process and the fact I’ve only got 6 days left means I’m going to have to work my backside off to get this all done before November 1^st rolls around. Here’s hoping I manage it. Last year when I went into NaNo I only had half of my novel detailed properly. The rest was only vaguely outlined and detailed and The Darkling Watch came out crazy towards the end.

I'll let you know how it's going over the month, making sure to have at least one post a week detailing my progress throughout the month. This will be on top of my RoW80 posts and another independent post. Hopefully I can juggle all this stuff. If you don't hear from me assume I've gone a little bonkers and had to be locked away. Or at the least that my parents have taken my laptop away from me.

Keep writing.