About Me and NaNo
Getting started
I found NaNo through an article in a writer's magazine. Being between jobs that month, you'd think NaNo would be easy. Instead you find yourself guilt-ridden each time you sit at the PC, faced with the nagging question: NaNoWriMo.org...or Monster.com? On the last day of NaNo, after a 22-hour writing blitz, I finished just under the wire with fifty thousand words - and eleven to spare.
The second year, I had a job and although I didn't have another last-minute marathon writing session, when Crunch Time hit, I found myself removing all contractions and abbreviations to boost my word count by 400 - enough to finish around 50,060 or so.
What I Wrote
Year 1 was an erotic story from an idea I'd had for a couple of years set in an Ancient Roman alternate universe. Year 2, I chose a 19th century supernatural romance. This year it's a kind of sociopolitical, sci-fi romance. Or least that's my best guess.
After NaNo
Well, they stunk, of course. I didn't like the characters, the situations they got into, and historical fact was certainly not crowding up my prose.
But still, I print one hard copy and put everything on a CD. I put those plus any leftover notes and scraps in file wallet labelled with the working title and date, and file it. I know that if I ever want to revise them, or cannibalize them for other works, they're there.
Lessons Learned (so far)
- Historicals are bad NaNo projects if you don't already know a lot about the era you're writing in.
- The solution to word count in erotica is not to throw another sex scene in there at random. They never take as many words as you'd like.
- Write down descriptions of your characters, especially the secondary ones. There was one in particular where I couldn't remember in Chapter 12 the hair color I gave her and had to go back several chapters to find a description.
- I don't have to come back to a work to revise it or finish it right away. Or 6 months from now. Or ever.
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