zanzjan | Entries tagged with nanowrimo

Miledrop

50,025 / 110,000 words (45%)
NaNoCheaMo total: 18,982

Really tough getting momentum going tonight, but finally got some decent words out. Babies being sick means I'm even more sleep-deprived than usual, and exhaustion is the enemy of inspiration. But hey, hopefully tomorrow will be an easier day.

( a short first-drafty excerpt )

Current Mood: my feet are cold

Miledrop

44,350 / 110,000 words (40%)

Have finished revising all the way to the end of what I'd completed of the first draft, so tomorrow we leap into new word territory. Pretty happy with what I've got so far, and I think I've resolved what was bothering me on the last pass.

First, though: sleep. This was a rough week.

Miledrop

38,000 / 110,000 words (35%)

I'm sure this is getting tedious for all my non-writer friends, but hey, what the heck else do I have to talk about? Some spectacular baby-poo today, it was this amazing col-- What? Go back to talking about writing? Okay!

This leaves me only about 7k worth of original first draft left before I hit the edge of the cliff and have to start flapping out new words or fall. Decided to up the credit I'm giving myself to 30% for NaNoCheaMo, since the amount of rewriting is getting more substantial. Again, since I've blatantly declared that I'm cheating, it's not like anyone's gonna cry foul on me at this point anyway (-:

So I decided that I was going to work on Miledrop this month. Before this my first draft was around 45k, and I've gone through and revised about 10k of that, with a fair bit of work. A wordcount isn't going to accurately represent the new work because I've also been tightening things up as I go. I decided that the effort & new work probably equaled about 25%, so I credited myself about 2300 words for NaNo. Sure I could be further, but then, I'm also on a road trip with lots of social obligations and two 18month old babies.

Yeah, I know real NaNo is new words only, but I'm cheating, so there. Still, I think 25% seems fair, especially since at that rate it'll take me to new words before I'm done with my 50k. Anyone else who is doing the same sorta thing have an algorithm for determing NaNo progress they'd care to share?

of NaNoCheaMo.

I have so far revised 27,545 words of Miledrop, and now I'm finding myself needing to make a map of where the good guys, bad guys, and the Major Plot Goodie are before I can write much further. I've written 1242 words of Surf, which I'd've gotten farther on if my head wasn't totally and completely stuck in Miledrop. This means that, by my count, my "score" for the month so far is 28,787 words. Which is really incredibly good, considering I've got two teething babies and I'm trying to get an entire (gigantic) building's server and network infrastructure, including a student computer lab, up and running before the end of January.

The total wordcount of Miledrop stands at just over 40k, and I've only killed off a couple of people so far -- makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

So. Not sure how much more words I'll get down before midnight tomorrow night, though I expect to have a very nice diagram of where all my characters are by then -- hard to quantify that in terms of equivalent wordcount, and also hard not to go overboard and turn it into an exercise in cat vacuuming, but necessary before more words can happen. I know I shouldn't be at all dissatisfied with my progress, but... well, I'd hoped to have at least some claim on 50k before the month was out.

Anyhow, that's where the writing thing stands. Now I have to go figure out how to clean my supposedly self-cleaning oven, which so nicely filled my house with smoke last night when I tried to get it to clean itself. )-:

Thus far I've revised about 24k of Miledrop, which is fairly significant in that I'm not just tightening up my sloppy drafty prose, but I'm actually excising a superfluous character from the main action of the book and that means not only pulling him out but reassigning all the stuff he does, all of which has a snowball effect in terms of exponentially increasing changes to the plot. So while I've only increased my total wordcount by about 1300 words, significant changes have occurred in rewriting, so I'm not really sure what to claim for my NaNo wordcount. Average the two? I dunno, I'll figure out something that seems a fair reflection. Those of you who are also cheating, how are you counting your progress?

Anyhow, all this puts me a little over half-way through the partial first draft I'd had going before I realized I'd turned down a blind alley a ways back and had to retreat and start over. From here on out the slogging gets harder and the balance of work will shift further from revising to writing, which'll slow me down -- maybe I should count it as the full 24k, just so I don't feel like a total loser come the end of the month. Especially since I now have internet access back, and all the distraction and procrastination-enabling that goes with it.

Current Mood: is it dinner time yet?

btw, I'll be attempting, with no great expectations of success, NaNoWriMo again this year -- or rather, my modified variant I like to call NaNoCheaMo. 'Cause I'll be working on a short and some revision and some new novel stuff too, with the understated goal of simply "getting some writing done."

anyone wants to buddy me, my username is cicada

I'm going to be counting progress from this point forward on Miledrop as my NaNo project. Usually I track wordcount via proper manuscript wordcount procedures, which is one word = 6 characters. For the purposes of NaNo, which counts whole words the Micro$oft Way, I re-tallied my wordcount using Word's in-built feature. This inevitably leads to a reduction in number of words, since I don't tend to write a lot of prose full of teeny words.

So, conversion of Miledrop from Real Wordcount to Word Wordcount:
38,848 --> 34,297

Having done that, all that remains is for me to work on actually putting more words down. I can recalibrate back to Real Words when November is over. Of course, I totally overdid it yesterday and today and I may not last long enough tonight to have done much more than I already have. For various life-based reasons, I don't have high expectations of hitting 50k this year, but I'm hoping to still make a good dent in what's remaining of this first draft before the month is out.

(For anyone else doing NaNo, I'm on as cicada. And for anyone who has no idea what I'm talking about, go here)

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