I’m Doing It Again

NaNoWriMo that is.

I’ve tried twice before – 2006 and 2008 – and both times I quit after a few days and a couple thousand words or so. To be fair in 2006 my laptop died 4 days in and although I had other computers to write on (and eventually bought the laptop I’m typing on now) it rather took the wind out of my sails.

I’ve avoided it since then despite feeling a ‘tug’ every Oct/Nov. It’s a seductive idea – give yourself to something completely for 30days and at the end have something, a novel, to show for it. The argument against is that any novel I write under those conditions won’t be very good and may not even be salvageable in the edit.

However I’ve decided to do it anyway because what is life without attempting things that might not work. And even if the end result isn’t the best I’m going to try to make the process fun.

So I’ve joined the forums, added buddies from the Ship of Fools, added NaNos to my Google+ circles and downloaded and installed some new software.

My big plan to succeed this year is to actually have a plan this year rather than simply an idea and then start writing (known in NaNo-speak as a ‘pantser’) and in order to facilitate planning I’ve installed Scrivener which has a special NaNo trial version that expires 7th Dec. It also has a Linux Beta which works really well. So far I’m loving it.

So expect a series of updates on progress. Not sure how frequent. Possibly I’ll do a daily word-count check-in on G+ and a weekly report here.

Here’s my NaNo profile if you want to add me.