Less than 12 hours to kick off of NaNoWriMo for me. At the stroke of midnight, I can type up my first paragraph, enter my word count, and crash. I was up at 4:30am (for me, that’s disgustingly early) so I could go in to work early today.
So I’m exhausted already, and its only 1 o’clock. But I have so much to do today still! I have to run some errands after work, then I have to rush home and put out our outdoor decorations for tonight (have to have the lighted pumpkins so the kids know we’re giving out goodies), pull out the boxes of chips (we give out the vending machine sized bags of chips, bought in bulk at a club store, instead of candy) and set that up for easy hand out. Then I have to send out the final schedule for the weekend volunteers with RESCUE. After that, I have to finish setting up a website. And finally I’ll get some time to do a bit more research and set up a rough outline. I have an opening scene in my head, so I can at least type that up and say I did something. Likely I’ll spend time on Saturday afternoon fleshing out the outline and the characters a bit more. I’ve just been so busy this week, with work, volunteer stuff, and doing some commissioned beadwork, that research and outlining had to take a back seat.
Let’s hope that’s not an indicator of how the writing itself will go. Best of luck to all of you participating in NaNo this year! And thanks for stopping by. Now I need to go and wash this purple ink off my hands, and get back to work (lunch break is over).
NaNoWriMo starts one week from tomorrow!!! Yes, I am participating. I am PurpleInkSpot over there (whodathunkit). Do I know what I’m going to write about yet? Sort of. But not really. I have a general idea of my three main characters, one of which is likely more of a supporting character, but who knows, we’ll see where that goes. I have a general idea of setting. But until this week, I still didn’t know what the story was going to be. I realized something while listening to some writing podcasts earlier this week (thank you Michael Stackpole).
Conflict. I needed some sort of conflict for my characters. Without conflict, you really don’t have much of a story or plot. So I did some brainstorming yesterday, during my long commute (I was playing taxi to a RESCUE dog so I had a little extra time behind the wheel for deep contemplative thought). I came up with conflict. The two main characters each have their personal conflict to deal with, their own baggage. Then together, they will face down the third and final conflict. Now that I have that figured out, I can sit down this week and put together a rough outline to work from.
I have a little bit more research to do this week still. One of my characters is of a “supernatural” nature and I’ve realized that my knowledge of this being is really somewhat limited. So I’m researching some of the “rules” of this type of being. I’m hoping that will help me further develop her personal conflict.
I’m a member of the NaNoWriMo 2008 Swap Group over at Swap-Bot. We just completed a swap to create/buy a NaNoWriMo Mascot for our partner. For the partner I send to, I made a black cat from polymer clay. It sort of looks like a Maneki Neko. In the upraised paw it holds a pencil. Instead of holding a coin to its chest, it holds a piece of paper. I wish I had taken a picture, it turned out quite cute. My send partner is a cat person, so I figured she’d like that. The partner that sent to me went above and beyond. She sent me a pin and magnet reminding me to put my butt in a chair and my hands on the keyboard (though in my case it will be butt in chair hands on notebook first, then I’ll type it up later). Along with that she sent me a mascot for each week!! She wrapped them up separately, so I’m waiting for next Saturday to open the first one.
Still so much to do and only seven days left to do it all. I need to get down to work. But first, I need to go and wash this purple ink spot from my hand. Thanks for stopping by!
