A NaNoWriMo update.

Current word count: 36,109

Word goal before I sleep tonight: 38,000

Goal for Day 26: 43,334

Words behind where I should be: 7,225

Days left: 5, counting the 26th

Words per day to finish on time: About 3,200 or 3,300, since the NaNo word counter runs about 500 words lower than OpenOffice's.

I'm not feeling discouraged, exactly, but I'm a little bit worried about how far behind I am. I don't even remember how it happened, except that a couple of days' lack of writing was because of the Harry Potter premier...

Verification for winning novels started today (erm, yesterday? The 25th.) and I know a lot of people have won already...

If anyone, NaNo participant, or winner, or neither, has advice or encouragement to get me through this, I'd really appreciate it. I need all the help I can get.

If you're looking fr my novel, you can find it here.

Vlog: A Rant & Thanksgiving

Venting some frustration, and recognizing some of what I'm thankful for this year.

NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us...

So writing this even though I won't be posting it until at least tomorrow. I'm typing it on Sheeps. What's Sheeps? The ten-year-old Toshiba laptop running Windows XP that I borrowed from Emily; the tool I will be using to compose a novel throughout the month of November. Sheeps is an interesting machine: it has no battery, and must be run from a power cord. It has a 9 GB hard drive with just less than 3 gigs of free space. It's got Open Office, Windows Media Player, and my image editing program, and that's about it. Oh yes, and this darling little binary .exe that Em installed:

This is where Sheeps got its name. These little guys are roaming back and forth along my taskbar and along the tops of my windows. They're adorable, and I'm sure they're going to be a distraction, but a small one and also the only one: Sheeps doesn't get internet unless I plug it directly into our router downstairs. This makes it the ideal tool for National Novel Writing Month. It's really not much more than a glorified word processor, and that is exactly why I asked to borrow Sheeps in the first place.

Anyway. This is probably going to be my last blog until the end of November (not that I've had a lot to say recently anyway!), unless I really need a break from writing or something spectacular happens.

Anyone looking for my NaNo profile can click here. You can also keep up with my NaNoWriMo novel on Blogger. Just check out Our Eyes to the Stars.

An influx of natural and man-made disasters in the early 21st century sent the country into chaos. Nearly unanimous in their panic, the United States relinquished their Constitutional rights and fell gratefully under martial law... a set of temporary security measures that never lifted. Now, a century or more in the future, the Bill of Rights lies forgotten, and everyone is said to be exactly the same, no matter who you are or where you work--which is about the only important thing, because race has been all but forgotten due to pre-birth injections to mute pigment in your skin, and there's no such thing as a religion, except in outdated history books, which are even more outdated... when you think of the fact that there hasn't been a real, new, ink-and-paper book published in over sixty years.

Can you picture it? Can you see it? Good, that's important. Because these stories are to be a teacher, and a warning.

The future brings more trouble than you know.

With that said, I wish you all a wonderful month; and to all of you Wrimos out there, the very best of luck! I know we're all going to need it!

I've got such extensive plans for NaNoWriMo this year.

If you don't know what NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is, click here!

It's so crazy. I'd heard about it for two or three years, and when some of my friends were doing it last year, I decided to try it at the last second. I actually think the oh-what-the-heck decision happened on November first.

The result? It sucked, and that's probably being way too nice. The idea was half-developed and not planned, and all I did was stress myself out, because everyone else's projects were so lovely.

This year I've decided to re-write a very old project—my first serious prose project, in fact, entitled The Red Smog. The original was started when I was ten or eleven and was finished about six months before I turned thirteen. So, of course, it's horrendous. When discussing the old material with my friend, who has long nursed a soft spot for it, I believe I said something along the lines of, “Ugh! Burn it to shreds! What in the name of my life is my life? What was I thinking?”

Don't believe me? Here's proof: the entire thing was written in... *gulp*... Comic Sans font.

Yeah. I was that stupid.

Anyway! I've always loved the basic story of the piece (even if the writing itself is worse than three-year-old gorilla words) and some of the ideas and spin-off chapters I came up with after The Red Smog's completion were actually okay to look at, so when I was consulting that same friend about ideas for NaNoWriMo earlier this summer, she immediately suggested I use The Red Smog, and I agreed.

It's kind of frustrating that November is so far away! I've never made myself wait to start writing something before. It's always been a take-it-as-it-comes sort of deal. So I keep getting these ideas and random flashes of what I want to happen... and I have to keep squirreling them away! I think I sort of like the outcome though. Since it's a Sci-Fi story, I can draw inspiration from everyday life and just run with it—for example, for the past two says my house has been getting phone calls where the caller ID reads MINNEAPOLIS BUS. This inspired me to mess with the transportation system in the story, so that it would call you and tell you when you had to leave to catch your bus or train based on your location!

In short, making myself wait to start writing this story is giving me more time to think and more material to work with.

I can only imagine where it'll end up.

Anyone else planning on participating in NaNo this year?