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The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Monday, November 3, 2014

National Novel Writing Month... again

Here we go again.

The last two years have been pretty bad for NaNoWriMo. I know it's possible to do it despite the pressures of a military career, but somehow I've never quite gotten an idea good enough to make me spend my (suddenly much more limited) free time on it.

Hopefully this will be the year that changes that. I wouldn't say I've got a good idea this year (it's a variation on the old fantasy classic of "group of heroes gets summoned into alternate universe") but so far it's been compelling enough to keep me writing through the first few days.

Some of what I'm trying is not new. (Like the general idea for my plot.) Or like the chapter titles which are all references to another field yet still make sense as descriptions of what's going on in the plot. I did that last time I won NaNoWriMo, using chapter titles based on computer science; this year it's navigation.

Other tricks I'm trying are new - like making a whole bunch of little text files (each about 600 words or so) and using each one for an individual scene in each chapter. This way, if I don't feel like writing a particular scene, I can just skip it and go to the next one. Or the wide variety of reference files (that I still haven't put anything in beyond names) that should have descriptions of all the people and places I've come up with.

It's probably going to need a lot of editing come December, but that's always the way that NaNoWriMo works, isn't it?