NaNoWriMo 2023

[Negrek]

November looms once again... will you be writing?

If you're not familiar, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is a one-month writing challenge taking place in November. Traditionally the goal is to write a 50,000 novel in a month, but you can customize the challenge according to your needs. It's all about breaking through blocks and making big progress by trying to write quickly and focusing on process over results!

I'm going to be doing the 50,000 word challenge this year as usual. My goals are:

- Draft chapters 59, 60, and 61 of Salvage. I'm expecting this to eat around half the total word goal.
- And then fill out the rest with original writing! I actually feel like i have some solid ideas to work with for this section, so I'm hopeful that it will go better than my attempts at original work during NaNo have in the past. :P
- Okay, okay, fine, I'll probably also spend another 5k or so on some complete nonsense Salvage AU to amuse myself. Might as well be honest about it.

Anyone else planning to do NaNo this year? What will you be working on? As always, happy to buddy with anyone who'd like to over on the official NaNo site!

 

[Starlight Aurate]

Very excited for this! I won't be participating in the usual challenge this year, but I encourage anyone who's curious to give it a try! I made the 50k word goal two years in a row, and I was able to finish my fic as well as the backstories for two of my characters. As with last year, I'm going to make this my "National Novel Editing Month"--I aim to edit something every day in November. My current goal is to edit for 30 minutes every day, and I'm going to adjust that along the way as I need.

Good luck, all!

 

[FauxFox]

I'll probably try to join in on NaNoWriMo this year.
My goals are to continue Forgotten Topaz, at least a few chapters of it because I haven't worked on that in months, get a few chapters of Faux Truths to a spot where I am comfortable with releasing them, and also get a few chapters of Time and Time Again finished and out there. I'll probably also work on some of my other stories, as I've got a Warriors story that I've forgotten to work on in a while that desperately needs more chapters.
I doubt I'll get anywhere near the 50000 word goal, but I can still try.

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

My only hard goal is to average at least a thousand words a day, since writing 50k words in a NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNoWriMo has been a feat I've only managed once so far.

Beyond the obvious of "ironing out the next releasable chapters of Fledglings, Once a Thief, and Like a Dragon", I'll be working on some combination of the following in descending order of probability:

• Finishing the rough draft of Once a Thief’s 8th “block” of rough drafted material
• Rough drafting the next undrafted chapter of Fledglings’ drafting queue
• Working on finishing the rough draft of my pulled 2023 PMD Writers' Union contest entry turned 4(-ish)-shot
• Rough drafting the first 1-2 chapters of "The Zoroark Giftfic" from its existing plot outlines
• Working on a plot outline for my pulled Aeons and Avatars Contest entry turned Initial D-themed vignette series focusing around Miraidon
• Working on a plot outline for that crackfic idea I’ve had for a Charizard ‘M zombie apocalypse story that's been kicking around for a year or two now

I'll probably have my hands full just with the first three bullets, but who knows? Even when my wordcount is nowhere near the goal, my NaNoWriMos have had a pretty solid history for me of more spontaneous ideas getting fairly fleshed out.

 

[K_S]

I wish, but no rest for the wicked i guess... I'm going to spend themonth quing up fics to review for decembers festivities instead.

 

[System Error]

Well I'll try to make writing strides but 50000 words is kind of ridiculous. Hopefully I'll get enough done on Abyssal Despair to start actually posting it at least.

 

[Mirage]

No NaNoWriMo for me, I'll be attempting a reading challenge (a NaNoReaMo?) instead! I have a ton of stuff to catch up on after a crazier than expected October. I'm planning to start out by reading approximately 5000 words per day (around the length of a longer oneshot or chapter) and upping it if I'm consistently reading significantly more.

Wishing you all good luck in meeting your writing goals!

 

[Negrek]

All right, the end of NaNo is upon us! (As of a couple days ago... I'm still trying to get my life back on track, lol.) How did it go for you? Did you end up meeting your goal? And whether you did or not, did you learn anything along the way.

I did make the 50k for NaNo again this year:

In some ways, this NaNo went very well; probably the smoothest one for me in years. I almost always end up falling 10k words behind at some point or other and needing to scramble to catch up; there have been some ignominious 12k catch-up days in my past. This year I stayed pretty close to par almost the whole way through and never had to write much more than 3k on any given day.

I also wrote way more origfic than I expected this year! I actually ended up working on four different stories, two fic and two original, and I do think that I made some good progress on figuring out how I want to approach that original work.

On the other hand, I did not make the sort of progress I was hoping for with Salvage. I only got through around a chapter and a half, and ultimately did not resolve the plot problem that I'd been hoping to unknot. We might unfortunately take my success with original fiction this year as a sign of how desperate I was to procrastinate on hacking away at that particular plot problem.

So, pluses and minuses! I think actually the steady pace may have hurt me a bit this year. From my other experiments with writing process this year, it seems like "do a bit every day" works really well for editing, and has done a lot for improving my update schedule in 2023. However, it doesn't seem to work as well for drafting--it may actually be that doing bigger chunks at less regular intervals, or at least spending larger blocks of time pondering and trying to work through a draft even if not actively writing, may work better for me when I'm just trying to get the initial shape of things down. Valuable information to have! Not sure what the implication might be for next year's NaNo for me, but I think I'll try to change things up a bit in 2024, maybe see if I can test out "bigger chunks of writing" without actually going into wild-mad-dash mode.