Words : 50,000 (Microsoft Word)
Chapters : ~15
Pages : 91
Chapters : ~15
Pages : 91
Thoughts
Progress - Weirdly, I think this is the farthest I’ve advanced, plot-wise, during a NaNo Novel. Usually I’m only hovering around chapter five by the end of it, and very little has happened. Considering this was The Year of False Starts and I had to do a lot of crossing out and rewriting…I’m really perplexed as to how this happened.
Characters - Lots of surprises this year, from Roost and Peter especially. Roost proved herself more honor-focused than I’d ever expected from my snarky lady, and Peter has a streak of paranoia that should make his and Roost’s relationship quite interesting when I get them into the same scenes. Khulad and Casey fit more closely with how I pictured them - their interactions did surprise me in how easy they were to write, given the trouble I’d had with it in the past. I feel Xerxes was underdeveloped, though, and that she and Khulad didn’t have enough scenes.
Scheduling - Oh boy. Well, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, things didn’t get off to a great start. Youmacon was fantastic, but meeting freakin’ Linkara andDoug Walker took my head right out of writing and straight into the clouds for quite a while. A visit to my friends’ place the next weekend didn’t leave me much room to catch up. By about halfway through the month, I did get my act together - at that point, I had to write nearly 3,000 words a day to catch up; I managed to get it to around 2,500 for the last week. Turns out that extra thousand words is a lot to pack in, especially when I was still busy with school.
Music - My full intent was to use The Cider House Rules score for this novel. While I think it’ll still come into play later in the book, The Hunger Games has stolen the first part of this novel. “Healing Katniss” and “Reaping Day” in particular had a lot of scenes set to them.
Week of Doom - The infamous “Week 2” doldrums usually hit me during week three. This year, I had Week 4: Oh My God It’s the Last Week and I Don’t Have Enough Words Noooooo!
War Strategy - Before NaNo this year, I did a lot of plot outlining and backstory work, which helped a ton. During the event, I installed and tested ZenWriter - I really like the program; it runs full-screen, allows you to put up backgrounds (I used setting-related ones), and even has some music choices and type-writer sounds. Unfortunately, its word-counter is much stricter than either the NaNo site Validator or Microsoft Word, making it a little frustrating when I needed to write a specific number of words. Still, it’s definitely a nice program to look into (and did I mention it’s free?)
2013 Plans - NOT to come into November fresh off an editing project. Inner Editor was very chatty, so I probably spent much more time rewording sentences and trying to avoid cliched phrases than I ought to have. I’d also like to take more time during October to prepare; what time I did take this year helped a lot, but I feel Roost and Peter, especially, were very neglected in the planning process.
