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My First NaNoWriMo: Last Day!

NaNo Joy! I feel absolutely exhilarated for so many reasons.My biggest takeaways from this experience was completely obliterating a few beliefs I held about myself as a writer.

Belief #1: I’m a slow writer. Wrong! Totally false! I can write like the wind, especially with a little planning. Thank you, Tara Dairman, for echoing this back to me in September and also for providing some solid tools and inspiration to make it happen. With those and the tools I shared

Belief #2: I can’t make time...

My First NaNoWriMo: Week 4

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you are enjoying your family and friends today. I’m so thankful for so much–family, friends, and an opportunity to keep writing. Check it out!I surpassed 50,000 words on Saturday, November 19!

I am astonished. Shaking my head in utterdisbelief. How can this be?

And then I kept going. When I compiled it from Scrivener into Word, it was 202 pages. 202 pages in 19 days. What the heck? (see my word count through yesterday below)

I will have a final summing up next...

My First NaNoWriMo: Week 3

So, this was an interesting week. It was still a lot of fun, but I definitely had days when I thought to myself:

“I don’t feel like writing today.” Even though I had my killer outline and plenty of scenes I could write, Ididn’t want to.

“Why not?” the voice continued. “You’ve got plenty of words in the bank. You’ll make the 50,000-word goal.”

And that was true. But as I’ve mentioned, hitting the word count was only one aspectof my goal. Another aspectwas writing every day. And I wanted to s...

My First NaNoWriMo: Week 2

Wow. I am having so much fun with this NaNoWriMo thing! Following are some of my observations and experiences.

So after hanging to with the gang last Tuesday and doing some timed writing bursts really got me fired up. So I kept going with it, setting my timer and trying to write as fast and as much as I could. Here’s what I discovered:

1,677 words? No problem. This may change, but right now I am easily writing more than the minimum word count, often in under an hour. This is very exciti...

My First NaNoWriMo: Week 1

The closer Nov 1 approached, the more anxious and excited I became. Below you’ll see and read about some of myfinal preparations as well as how my first two days went. (I’m scheduling these posts the night before so they go out at the same time every Thursday).

Final Preparation

As November 1 loomed, I took the following steps:

Set up Scrivener. I set up the plot outline from last week, dividing up 30 empty chapters among the six stages, even though I haveno idea how many chapterswill be...

New Book, New Approach IV: Final NaNo Prep

So here I am, facing down NaNo in just five short days.I completed my plot outline, the structure of which I share below, and am going to be fleshing it out a bit more so I feel ready to jump in on November 1. Last week I shared the tools I was using to create an outline that would work for me. Most of the outline is straight from Michael Hauge’s Six Stage Story Structure for screenplays because it worked so well for this novel. You’ll also see K.M. Weiland‘s pinch points added in and I plan...

New Book, New Approach III: Plot Outline Points

I’m not gonna lie, developing a plot outline has always been a bit of a turnoff. I knew a book outline wouldn’t be the Roman Numeral I thing, but it still sounded academic. Once I got over that, the whole idea scared me. I’d have to really think about my story and what if there was nothing there? At least when I jumped in right away, I could experience the thrill of the new idea before it petered out.

But this time I was determined. And I decided to get as much help as I could, taking both th...

New Book, New Approach II: Brainstorming

So digging into character last week really helped ideas for plot bubble up! Highly recommend that.

Then I sent a doc to my critique group in advance of our September 30th meeting. In it, I gave them a very general summary of my idea–since it was still prettyvague to me–along with the few specifics I actually did know, like the character arc. I also included my brainstorming session which had resulted in a series of questions and a fewstatements. It was two single-spaced pages of ramblings–so...

New Book, New Approach I: Character

Even though I’ve published four novels, I did not doany kind of pre-planning when I wrote them. I just got the idea and dove in, stalling, restarting, taking long detours as I figured out the story and my characters. I may still do a lot of wanderingwith this book, but I’m curious to see if a new approach changes the process in any way for me. Not just how the book unfolds, but how I like it.

Character Charts

Using a handout from the story plotting class I just finished with author and teach...

Out of My Comfort Zone

So last week my big plan was to write about the RMC-SCBWI Conference on Sept 17-18. And then a friend invited me to an all day silent yoga and meditation retreat in Estes Park on Thursday.

My first reaction was “Yay! Cool!”

My second reaction was: “That’s a lot of yoga and meditation. I don’t think I can do it. My monkey mind has extra monkeys today. They’ll multiply by Thursday.”

My third reaction was: “Who does yoga for that long? Experts. I’m not an expert.”

My fourthreaction was:“Thursday...