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[Ehndras]

How many of you guys are participating and have participated in the past?

Last year I never got past 15,000. Didn't have the time or the patience due to downsizing in my company. Aka same pay, more work and longer hours.

This year, I'm balancing military with civilian and trying to find time to even sleep properly... I'm scraping by with my lengthy Scifi RP on the Bay12 forums (in my sig, Pixel Station) and have who knows how many thousand words from that. Hell, if I combine it with the original source information from my Scifi 'novel' I never completed, I could probably muster 50,000 words.

I know you don't have to write a full 50,000 words of coherent fluid writing like a published novel would be, but I don't feel right about a 'novel' not being seamless. Then again, I'll likely NEVER publish due to my need to constantly add more and perfect it. What started as a 200-word short story has become a possibly 4-book (AT MINIMUM) Scifi story ranging from pre-human Earth all the way to Human expansion across the stars following a multitude of galactic wars, genetic experimentation, and the discovery of an ancient trans-dimensional alien race that's frighteningly similar to humans. I've got a few dozen alien races on the drawing board also, though I've only dedicated maybe 5 paragraphs to each.

[Ehndras]

Damn it. I completely forgot about NaNo. I just stumbled on this thread now, actually, and posted that.

Its halfway through...

Think I'll be crazy and try to nail 50,000 having starting halfway through o_O Considering how I started the new scifi RP within November, its legal.

So far I haaaaaaave... 6,000 words.

Sigh. This is going to be rough. I need 3,000 words per day to hit 50k by the end of NaNo.

Yeah, I don't think I can catch up. >_>

[Un67]

After 44329 words, the climax has been hit.

In two days I will be finished.

FINISHED

[Willfor]

Got 5.5k done today. My fingers hurt. Almost to 30k.

[Capntastic]

I've been completely slaughtered by work and other dreadful things, so I'm pretty much 'giving up'.  Inability to focus on one thing was what slayed me in the end. Keep going, the rest of you, though.

[Sappho]

I thought about doing this this year, but with my 12-hour-per-day work schedule, it doesn't seem feasible. However, I've just remembered that there's a long story I started years ago but never finished. It's already at 21,578 words. It's not really a "novel" so much. In fact, it comes from this very site, though I don't know if the people involved are still around. I hosted a DF-based online QAGS roleplay using a plot I had designed for the QAGS resource bank. (They later published a full-length setting that I wrote, which I still get royalties on if anyone buys, so have a look if you like.)

Basically, we saved the game logs for each playing session (and OH the fun we had!), and when it was finally over, I decided to turn the game into an epic story as a gift to the players. Unfortunately I ran out of steam and never finished it, but I still have the logs and I could use NaNoWriMo as an excuse to push myself to finish it like I always wanted to.

I know it's not exactly the traditional goal of the month, but if it pushes me to finish this project, it'll be worth it. Maybe I won't hit 50,000, but if I finish the story I'll consider it a success.

[SirAaronIII]

Hey guys, how are you doing?

I think I'm doing okay. I'm hearing about all these other people who are already 50000+, though.

[Sappho]

I wish there was a way to enter how many words you'd written on past days instead of simply updating it each day and letting it calculate it automatically. What if you don't have time to get online and update one day? It skews your graph.

Anyway, I signed up as kotshka, if anyone wants to add me as a writing buddy. I added another few thousand words yesterday and while I don't think this one will ever reach 50,000, I'm quite pleased that I'm finally pushing myself to finish this baby.

Also, in case anyone is stressing more about their word count than about the quality of their novel, here's a really interesting and thought-provoking blog by one of my favorite authors, Max Barry, with some thoughts on NaNoWriMo and analysis of various writing methods. I think he makes some good points and it's worth keeping all this in mind when you're worried about meeting that deadline.

On the other hand, I had a brilliant professor in University who was sponsoring me for my senior honors thesis. As I was approaching the deadline and not even close to finishing, too worried about getting everything perfect, he said one thing that made the whole process a thousand times easier: "Just get it done. You have the rest of your life to get it right."

[Biag]

Okay, so I'm eighteen thousand words in, putting me seventeen thousand words behind today's goal, and I don't have a conflict or a question or even a plot hook. I want to scrap everything that happened in the last ten thousand words. If I'm going to finish this year, I have to establish a central question or goal for the main characters to work towards, and I have to do it fast if I'm going to be any kind of motivated. There's still time to turn this around, but damn the next ten days are going to be busy.

[Capntastic]

Of course it makes sense to me that after I officially quit Nanowrimo, I'm given a burst of inspiration and energy for working on other writing projects, like breathing life back into my nearly abandoned website.  Here's an article about Infinity Blade and the ebook based on it, clocking in at 2.5k words. Took me about an hour to jam out.

[mendonca]

Just bust through the 40,000 word mark, so I'm really well placed, and my outline, to this point, has changed a little bit but has proved far too accurate. I'm only something like 180 words outside my November 1st budget, and I've only revised the chapter list once.

I'm either really good at this, or I don't mind writing crap to a rigid framework. Can't wait to re-read it in December and find out.

I now sit at a little quandary, having bought myself a couple of days, and that is how much time do I spend thinking about a reasonable climax, or do I just continue to push out stuff in accordance with plan A?

Capntastic: That is a remarkable standard of writing for 1 hours work, and a good read. Thanks for posting.

[Un67]

50050.

Yes, I am now finished. It's really quite horrible to read, but I'm finished.

[Capntastic]

50050.

Yes, I am now finished. It's really quite horrible to read, but I'm finished.

Congrats, Un!  That's super amazing of you to be done so quick.  Just don't look at it for a month and then gradually dip into it for editing.

[Ehndras]

I wish there was a way to enter how many words you'd written on past days instead of simply updating it each day and letting it calculate it automatically. What if you don't have time to get online and update one day? It skews your graph.

Anyway, I signed up as kotshka, if anyone wants to add me as a writing buddy. I added another few thousand words yesterday and while I don't think this one will ever reach 50,000, I'm quite pleased that I'm finally pushing myself to finish this baby.

Also, in case anyone is stressing more about their word count than about the quality of their novel, here's a really interesting and thought-provoking blog by one of my favorite authors, Max Barry, with some thoughts on NaNoWriMo and analysis of various writing methods. I think he makes some good points and it's worth keeping all this in mind when you're worried about meeting that deadline.

On the other hand, I had a brilliant professor in University who was sponsoring me for my senior honors thesis. As I was approaching the deadline and not even close to finishing, too worried about getting everything perfect, he said one thing that made the whole process a thousand times easier: "Just get it done. You have the rest of your life to get it right."

Simple!

Google 'word counter', copy what you wrote a certain day, paste, and then you know. I separate each day's work by a little pillar design, so I know the information might be a little screwy. (Considering how I like to go widely off-topic without meaning to, as I explore vast, profound ideas that end up shadowing the original idea )

[Sappho]

I'm writing in Google Docs, so there's no problem counting the words, I just mean it's impossible to see it on the graph if you update the NaNoWriMo site late. I also don't see any way to list the number of words you wrote each day, after the fact. I mean, I know there's a visual representation on the graph, but it's tiny and there's no actual word count. It'd be interesting and possibly useful to be able to look back and see, for example, how many words you wrote on Tuesdays versus Saturdays or something.