The tortoise who died yesterday and the rock

I remember lack of motivation killed it for me the first year. Also, depression and confusion. I broke up with my boyfriend of 3 years during that NaNo (though not NaNo-related). Also, lots of schoolwork.

Thankfully, I managed to get help for depression this time, and also, managed not to break up with my boyfriend of almost two years Schoolwork is doing fine, too.

DamaNegra said:

I broke up with my boyfriend of 3 years during that NaNo...

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Thankfully, my wife hasn't yet hinted at anything close to a divorce because of NaNo...

My boss gave me a two-week project one week before my vacation. I've written not one word of my nano in a week now, and am hopelessly behind.

My only hope now is that during my vacation I can pour 8 hours a day into writing.

:|

If you check on the NaNo board, you'll find that a big chunk of those who register write exactly 0 words during the month. So no, you're not the lowest by any means.

But I'm curious: Why don't you add to your word count instead of wondering how badly you can do this month? Just saying, because I too have "lost" NaNo, in fact, I've lost four out of four previous attempts. But I didn't stop writing just because I wasn't going to make 50K.

So: How many words do you think you can add to your novel by the 30th? Think you can double your count? Triple it?

I'll give you a big piece of Black Forest Cake I've been saving (heck, I've got the whole cake in my Photobucket account!) if you can set a goal for this week and keep it!

Prizes for you and anyone else who's behind who can do that, too.

Deek, what's your target?

And no-one is really hopelessly behind: remember that if you type 1000 words every hour, and spend eight hours per day typing, you can still manage to pull it off! (Not very realistic or sensible, IMO, but some folks have done it, and you can too if you really want to...)

It's enough that you set a target and do something to hit it.

As for shipping the cake, it'll probably get smushed in the mail (if the posties don't confiscate it and eat it themselves ) but I'll do my best.

I'm having another word war at quarter to whenever it will be where you are. (About 13 minutes from now, in other words.) Join me?

Yeshanu said:

Prizes for you and anyone else who's behind who can do that, too.
Deek, what's your target?

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My target is 50,000 words by midnight on the 30th, of course.

My expected gift is a lock of your hair, of course.

The Lonely One said:

(looks at word count) Am I to think I'm winning this thread then?

Oh, and I really don't have a good story as to why my number is so low. I did start halfway through, added onto a WIP instead of starting anew (only counting new words, of course), and basically put in maybe 100-150 words a day on average.

But like the title says, in this race I'm pretty much the rock.

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I dunno, counting last night's 482 word Flash Fiction story, I'm all the way up to 1702 words! That's WAY ahead of my 900 word NaNoWriMo effort from last year.

And the last night of the month is next Sunday, so I'm almost sure to add to that, even if I don't write between now and then.

Yeshanu said:

If you check on the NaNo board, you'll find that a big chunk of those who register write exactly 0 words during the month. So no, you're not the lowest by any means.

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I have the impression such people are just registered from earlier years and are just sitting it out this year, perhaps just doing other things with their lives. I've got (at least) three Writing Buddies from a year ago, one or more who have attempted and even won in several previous years, with a zero word count. So I wouldn't count zero-word authors as participating or "attempting."

Yeshanu said:

But I'm curious: Why don't you add to your word count instead of wondering how badly you can do this month? Just saying, because I too have "lost" NaNo, in fact, I've lost four out of four previous attempts. But I didn't stop writing just because I wasn't going to make 50K.

So: How many words do you think you can add to your novel by the 30th? Think you can double your count? Triple it?

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That SHOULDN'T be very hard, I'd agree with that...

But seriously, there's something about this writing longer stories that I haven't been able to push myself into. I've been doing the FF stories almost weekly since the Sunday Night Challenge was started almost two years ago in January 1997, but pushing myself to write longer stories (and pushing the characters around, bla bla bla...) has been rather elusive to me. And yeah, I know one object of NaNoWriMo is for writers like me to do just that sort of thing no matter how shitty the words.

Yeshanu said:

I'll give you a big piece of Black Forest Cake I've been saving (heck, I've got the whole cake in my Photobucket account!) if you can set a goal for this week and keep it!

Prizes for you and anyone else who's behind who can do that, too.

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We'll see what I can do. If I can get in the habit of writing just a couple thousand words a day, I'd be much happier about this year's NaNo.

Yeshanu said:

Deek, what's your target?

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No fair tempting him, he already explained how he had an unexpected work situation. Not sure about The Lonely One, but I know have little to no excuse.

Yeshanu said:

And no-one is really hopelessly behind: remember that if you type 1000 words every hour, and spend eight hours per day typing, you can still manage to pull it off! (Not very realistic or sensible, IMO, but some folks have done it, and you can too if you really want to...)

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dclary said:

My target is 50,000 words by midnight on the 30th, of course.

My expected gift is a lock of your hair, of course.

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Send me an address, and I'll give you three strands of my (not so) golden hair. Will you set it in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of your house?

And Ben, you have to re-register every year for NaNo, so I think most of those zeroes are from folks who register in October, then forget about the challenge. (Or they don't post updates, which was my situation some years.)

Be that as it may, set your target. As in, a verifiable number. For this, I'll even accept shorts, as long as the total word count adds up to what you are aiming to hit. If you want to get into the habit of writing 2000 words a day, I'd say a good goal for you might be 15,702. that's two thousand words every day from now until the 30th (including today ), plus the 1702 you've already written. Go, Ben, go!

Yeshanu said:

Send me an address, and I'll give you three strands of my (not so) golden hair. Will you set it in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of your house?

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Oh, um, yeah. That's the ticket!

/throws away plans to clone LOTR-loving sex harem.

I don't participate in Nano because 2,000+ words is really difficult for me to do on a daily basis, especially since I keep really busy with my journalism life.

However, I've been trying to meet a daily target for the last couple of weeks, and even though my number is small, doing it every day just keeps adding up. I typically try to aim for a scene a day, but here's the best part: I'm only focusing on numbers for now. My only concern is that I spit out 80,000 - 100,000 words of trash within the next few months and have something that resembles a story. Once that's done, I'll get down to the edits.

I've worked on an idea before and given up, worked on a first draft and given up.

The idea of writing is always more pleasant than the actual writing itself. But because I'm keeping my standards low, I'm confident I'll make it past the finish line this time.

I love Anne Lamott's advice: get out a shitty first draft. Any way, any how.

Good luck!

I love you guys. Kudra, pick a target you think you can reach by November 30th, then post it in this thread. That's all you have to do to participate.

The Lonely One said:

If only news copy counted towards the daily word count...you and I would be rolling in words. Not together. Well, if it were together it would be platonic. (tells self to shut up). Yes, the idea of writing. I think I'll just bask in that for a while...

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Haha. Indeed, though I'll admit that I tend to procrastinate on that too.

Yeshanu, thanks! I'll aim for 10,000 words, 5,000 of which I've already done. So about 5,000 this week.

I'm pretty close. I've got about 5k now, so I'm not much further along than you are.

I'm pushing for 10k days now.

Yeah...not gonna happen, but its a nice thought.

Wavy, I'm with you. If I do 10k days, I can still pull this off. Not likely, since I don't know the plot of the book at all. There are times that I wish I was a plotter and not a pantster.

I think I can reasonably do another 20k, though.

I should get to at least 10k by tonight...I'm going to keep on trekking!

Broke 20K. If I hit 25K today, I'm still on track to win.

Go-go-gadget Wordprocessor!

Don't delete, don't delete, don't delete. Highlight the whole crappy part, turn the letters white so you can't see them, and keep writing from there.

There are a couple of reasons you should do that:

One: It adds to your word count, and we're counting words written here, not good words written.

Two: The time you're least able to judge what's crap and what's not, what fits and what doesn't is immediately after you've written it. There are so many times I've written something, thinking it's crap, to later find out it wasn't so bad after all or needed only minor changes. The stuff that really needs cutting? I often find that those are the words I fell in love with at first sight.

So don't delete, don't delete, don't delete. Leave judgement day until the novel is done, but get it done first.

Go you!

I'm at 8,035 words right now. I'm not going to push to meet the Nano finish line (my target was 10,000). Instead, I'm going to keep plugging away at my daily goal (800 words) until I reach The End.

I'm feeling good though. I've written about 10% of my novel in 10 days. Of course it's bad and will need editing (a number of times), but I'm putting down words.

At this point, that's all I care about. I didn't think I could. And I love proving myself wrong.

Keep going Kudra! You've got what it takes, and you know it now.

Lonely One, Wavy_Blue, Kryianna: How's it going?