Thursday, September 30, 2004

Like Christmas, but not quite

I'm so excited - tomorrow registration for NaNoWriMo opens! I realize this elevates me to a new level of geekiness, but hey - a girl's gotta have something to look forward to!

While last year's attempt was a stab at the fantasy genre, this year I'm going to hack away at science fiction-themed tale. I have my main characters partially fleshed out in my head, a beginning, a major crisis (complete with plot twist!), but no way to get there from the intro. I have a rough setting, and premise, but that's it. Since you have to get about 1,600 words per day to meet the 50,000 word quota by then end of the month, you pretty much throw everything you have on the page and worry about the editing in December.

Last year, I only got roughly 13,000-15,000 words, and most of that was in the companion diary I was keeping. Once I started writing the story, I kept thinking how bad it was, how I didn't really like the characters, and how I really hadn't given much thought to secondary characters; as a result, they were poorly sketched and stilted. However, the bright spot was the keeping of the diary convinced me to start a blog, which I did at the end of December. I still post to it occasionally, but not as often as I used to.

Right - now to see if I can find my username and password from last year!