Fucking yes!

 

 

With great pride I can tell you that after a marathon 5 hour writing session, a litre of energy drink and twelve squares of chocolate, last night I managed to get the final 6K words written for NanoWrimo.

I've no idea how many days I spent writing. It may have been twenty or more but I'm not sure. It feels like it was a lot less. But one way or another I reached the 50K word target in under a month. Today I'm feeling good. I feel towards the end it was more about getting words down on the page and finishing the challenge rather then what was good for the story. Even with less then twelve hours having passed I've decided on a few changes and tweaks towards the end of the story. Once I've had a day or two to make the changes and check the grammar and more importantly recover from the experience I'll probably send it around to a few unfortunate souls who put themselves forward as willing readers. Hopefully the feedback will be positive but I've a feeling I'm about to learn about the other side of writing which is rejection. But whether my book is popular or not I just remind myself that this wasn't the reason I took part in this competition. The point was that I finally had to put pen to paper, so to speak, and write a story with a beginning middle and end. Is the story flawed? Yes. Do I think there is room for improvement? Certainly. Am I happy with the overall story, the world, the hero's and villains? I can say yes. Although as I've mentioned I can think of a few changes I want to make I'm happy with what I have. Overall I've enjoyed the experience and I look forward to meeting with my fellow NanoWrimo winners later for the autopsy of the event later on this evening.

For now dear readers I bid you well.

 

Number of competitors at outset: 7

Number of competitors to take part:3

Number of completed novels: 3 (preliminarily)

Number of chapters: 20

Number of words: 50,172

 

Later

Adam



One more day

Greetings,

Sorry for the lack of promised posts however as always real life got in the way.
In any case I'm in to the final week of NanoWrimo and my word count and story is slowly but surely coming up to it's conclusion. I set the task of getting 10K done over the weekend but I fell short on this target by about 4K tragically. With that in mind I sat down to get more done this evening and although I'm a thousand of the 45K target I had set myself I still feel I should hit the target later in the week.
The reason for the title of this post is down to the fact that I will be away from the computer tomorrow and Friday which will leave me Thursday evening to get the rest of the story done. Truth be told I'm reasonably confident that I can achieve this goal as I should have about six hours to get six thousand words done. Difficult, yes. Impossible no. Well I certainly hope not.
Its been fun as well to hear of the other people I've been doing this with are slowly coming towards the end of theirs and I look forward to reading over their attempts as well as sharing any war stories over the course of the month as well.

Word Count: 44,053

Later
Adam

So very very tired.

Greetings,

Well today was both good and bad. I started today with a blog post talking about how I hoped to hit the 45k mark this weekend. I had a nice long day ahead of me and in truth it shouldn't have proven that difficult. I had some things to take care of this afternoon but I had factored those in. I had some dinner and then I made the foolish mistake of having a one hour nap which turned in to five hours. Five hours of writing down the toilet. Such is life.
So I started a lot later and gave myself a lot less time. The fact that I wasn't tired however did allow me to get more done this evening then I possibly would have but we'll never know. In any case I managed to get over half way to my goal for the weekend. I'm also enjoying the fact that my book is reaching it's climax. Hopefully its as satisfying read as it has been to write. I'll get my final chance to hit my weekend target tomorrow evening however the window of time shall be much smaller. Hopefully I'll hit it.
In any case below are the details.

Word Count: 40,176
Target Count:45,000

Later
Adam

Other unachievable goals

Greetings all,

You may have noticed that I haven't gotten a blog post up in a few days. That's primarily to do with the fact that there was nothing to post. I've not had a great few days of writing as other more important and dare I say it fun things came up for me. Realising I was falling behind in my NanoWrimo I decided I would take today not just hit the word count I'm meant to be at but I've decided to kick it's ass in to next week. For me NanoWrimo will need to finish on the 29th as I'm heading out with a lot of friends on the 30th.
To this end I'm setting myself another ludicrous word count that I'm hoping to hit. That word count is 45K. Now I know it's going to be very difficult but I've freed up my entire day (bar a bit of protesting) which should give me a pretty good chance of hitting it. Even if I fall short of the 45K I'll be in a better position then when I start. I found last weekend that setting a high goal, while difficult is at least possible. This goal may be a bridge too far but I suppose if I don't try then I'll never know. So begins my start in to the final leg of the NanoWrimo experiment.

Where I should be: 38,333
Where I am: 35,665
Where I want to be: 45,000

Later
Adam

The bare necessities

Greetings all,

This post won't tell you much about the writing I'm doing at the moment but it will tell you about some of the pitfalls I've had to deal with when it comes down to actually getting some words done. Namely food.
For years I was a big fan of energy drinks like redbull and coke. I mean a big fan. At one point I was drinking between six and ten cans a day of the stuff but that was mostly in the more dramatic cases. This year however I managed to switch form coke to Coke Zero (it's not nicer I don't care what anyone says) as well as giving up energy drink almost completely. But then along came NanoWrimo. Unlike most people I don't get much if any caffeine kick from Tea and I hate the taste of coffee so I primarily get my fix from these drinks. As such I've fallen back on the energy drink waggon although far less then I was drinking before. Usually I can go without it however I've realised this week in  particular that I usually need it after my meals. I generally enjoy hearty meals with decent sized portions. I've cut bread virtually out of my diet entirely however apparently I forgot that fact during the week and each day I've lost about two hours each evening that I could have spent writing trying to crawl out of the food coma I've foolishly put myself in. It's just a pet peeve to be honest. It wasn't an issue last two weeks (when I got the bulk of my writing done) but that was namely down to the fact that my diet consisted of a chocolate bar and water as I was just craving enough sustenance to get me from day to day. That obviously had to stop this week as it wasn't very healthy. After this evenings coma and losing three hours of writing to a coma I thought about doing it again next week just to ensure I reach the final deadline. We'll see. In any case I'll just keep trying to get the words out. I also wish to give a shout out to my boy D-Money who has been working his ass off this evening and also to my boy Mick for finally getting in on the action.

Word Count: 35665
Days remaining: 9

Chapter fourteen

Greetings one and all,

Once again I made the mistake of having too much to eat and entering a terrible food coma that made getting any work done this evening almost impossible. However after a power nap (Take that Mick) I was able to finally sit down and get cracking on some words for NanoWrimo. I didn't particularly enjoy writing this section as it was a bit of an information dump for the characters (and by extension any possible readers I may coerce in to reading the completed text) but I'm not entirely sure it was A) Necessary or B) well written. I've realised that there are particular bits of dialogue I really enjoy writing however there are other bits I don't. I'm a fan of narrating some smack talk between two groups about to go to war or else a long narration on past events that can be quite interesting. This evening I pretty much had to write the whole "You need to do this to survive" conversation for our protagonists. It felt a bit crap if I'm honest and I'm not sure I like a lot of the dialogue around it. But we'll see.
I did find that throughout this book I've used the protagonist to ask the questions I feel the reader might want to know the answer to. Like why the hell would this guy to X instead of the obvious Y? Its been fun and hopefully the explanations I give are solid and not just a means to an end but again that's not something I get to decide. In any case here are the details of the progress so far.

Chapters 14
Word Count: 32,413

Later
Adam

Beyond the point of no return

Hello everyone,

So as I said in an earlier post I had set myself the target of 30k this weekend to bring me back to the point I wanted to be as part of my NanoWriMo endeavour. I was worried that I wasn't going to hit it as I wasn't sure I'd have either the time or the energy at certain points in the evenings. I had managed to get to 28k which while still a great amount to get done coming in to the week ahead I still wanted to get myself some breathing room and so I had aimed for 30k. After a fun day of watching movies and having fun with my family I returned to the apartment not sure where I was going to go next. As I mentioned last night I had added something that should help piece a few parts of the story together however I needed to begin that process and was kind of at a loss when I sat down. Thankfully I managed to figure how what I wanted to happen and I started typing. In the end it turned out to be one of the more fun bits of writing I've gotten to do and I got to flesh out some more characters that I quite like. Once finished I checked the word count and I've hit the 30k mark. The fact that I've written more of the book then I have left to write means I can see the end in site and I now just need to keep this momentum up. I've also made a conscious decision to walk away from it at this point as psychologically once I hit 30k my brain started to switch off. Apparently my brain is all up for letting me achieve my goals however it's not a big fan of letting me exceed them. It must have made a deal with me that I wasn't aware of that it would let me hit my count but then it was going to bed. But regardless of what how my brain is feeling I'm happy with the end to this week's writing. The story is coming along well. There are some characters I quite like and have enjoyed fleshing out more and I now know where the story is going  and how I'd like it to end.


Chapters: 13
Word count: 30592

Later
Adam