The November NaNoWriMo Wrapup and Other Writerly Junk

Now that November's over and NaNoWriMo is complete, I finally have the time to talk about last month's reckless abandon in writing, and all the crazy things I found and learned during the course of the month. 

 

Overall Stats

I ended up finishing NaNoWriMo with just shy over 53,000 words.  And a couple days later, I more or less finished the manuscript, which in total is 127,459 words.  Not bad for only three months of writing.  Easily the most creative production I've ever done in my life.  And man it feels good.   Also During this year's NaNoWriMo, I set a New daily Wordcount record for myself: 8,146 words on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. That massive push by my count should have netted me the 50k month win, but NaNoWriMo's official wordcount api differed from Word's by 350 words so, I officially finished up the next day.  

This year I also did a lot more work in tracking just exactly how I write, and how it stacked up against the posted suggestion from the folks over at the Office of Letters and Light.  If you know me, I love graphs and charts, so this was a great motivational tool for me. 

  I ended up starting a daily new wordcount spreadsheet back in late August, and ended up modifying it a bit to give me more granular information for November.  From there I broke out weekly Word Count V. Target charts and daily Word count v. Daily Target (1,667 words) Charts.  I also Made a daily Word count vs. 50k chart to see my progress grow with each day.  Week one was by far one of the most productive weeks of the whole month; I was really fired up, but it meant that I fell prey to the doldrums of Week two a bit, struggling a lot with exhaustion.  As I rolled towards week three I tried to ensure that my weekends were spent away from writing, taking two nights off, and I tried to ensure that I was a little better at getting sleep. 

Another practice that helped keep wordcount anxiety down was that I spent my lunch hours typing instead of reading or walking; that way on good days I'd killed already 700-1200 of the daily word count requirement.  Also on nights that Sue is at school, that made me   really try to push hard since Sue is always happy when she has to read stuff, and considering that school tends to make her tired and stressed, having a couple thousand new words always improved her mood.

So from there I ended up with what I have now.  Now that we're in December, I started using this program called yWriter to help me organize, tag and manage the novel's content.  It's amazing.  For example, last night after I loaded in all 76 of my chapters, I realized that the timeframe for the whole novel is only 12 days.  I also saw that almost every night, Nigel has a bad dream and/or interaction with Layil.  This is an unconscious construction on my behalf, but considering the novel's theme, it works really well. 

Speaking of Writing programs, during the month of November I started having my Google Reader account follow the Lifehacker bundle of blogs.  And Lifehacker did a huge and wonderful series on Writing Tools To make your life easier.  From all of these posts I downloaded a number of writing tools from Distraction free drafting clients to yWriter, to learning about 750Words.  Some of this stuff wasn't for me, but other things, namely yWriter and 750words are slam-a-cow awesome and will comprise the remainder of this blog post.

 

750words

The idea of this site is that every day you write three pages (250 words/page is the generally accepted standard) of stuff.  The site doesn't care what those three pages are, nor does it care how or when you do it, only that you do it.  By default this 350 words is private to only you, and you have to do some stuff to allow others to see it--which in this Dr. Strange-O world of disappearing privacy is a godsend.  I started 11/16 and in the last month have only missed two days.  One of the most sexy things about it for me is the fact that it puts together all kinds of really cool metadata metrics based on what you write.  Things like calculating your emotional state, recording the weather, most commonly used words, perception of time (Past present future), usage of the senses, etc.  You also get Xbox 360 like Achievements called Badges in the shape of an animal when you complete certain streaks or configurations.  I like rewards.  I also like the pressure of keeping a cumulative streak going.  I find myself using the site  as a cross between a brain dump, and a cheat to get myself to write something (like this blog entry) very quickly.  Did I mention it tracks how fast you type and how fast you reach your 750? My personal best is 11 minutes.  The brain dump aspect of it has really become a sort of look-forward-to therapeutic thing that at one time, in college, I did all the time, but sort of lost the initiative to do it at some point or another.  Either way, I’m totally engrossed in the site, and I’ve currently signed up for the December Challenge—750 a day for 31 days without missing a day.  So far So good.

yWriter

The idea behind yWriter is to organize, plan and help you write your novel.  It’s very similar in some respects to the popular Mac program, Scrivener, but from my limited experience using the Windows Beta of Scrivener, yWriter offers a lot more granular control to what you’re doing.  The primary modus of this is the notion that yWriter divides your novel into Scenes instead of chapters.  Chapters are still around, but rather than having the chapter as the smallest unit of the novel, yWriter goes down to the scene level.  And since everything’s a scene, and scenes belong to chapters, you can really get crazy with moving things around.  Also, yWriter has some serious metatag components built into it.  Each unit, Chapter, Scene, Character, Location, and Item comes with a tags field allowing you to specify metatags on everything.  Also, by allowing you to keep a running definition of Characters, Locations, and Items, you can further build consistency and, in my case, keep everything straight in my head.  yWriter also comes complete with tools to help you plan, manage, and assess your current writing progress by allowing you to set deadlines for various drafts as well as wordcounts, words/hour and all that kind of good stuff.

Since I’ve been considering turning this project into something that is both web based and non-linear in design, yWriter will help me get there.  I can tag and crosstag all of the elements in each manuscript, which form there can be sucked into a database of sorts and disseminated in a choose-your-own-adventure kind of way.  Also, with all the character, location, and item tag data, I can make mini-blog posts on the Ae’rinus blog to help build the flavor of the world, and enhance things that are going on in the background but not readily available in the current arc of the story.