{"id":9628,"date":"2015-11-04T09:09:34","date_gmt":"2015-11-04T15:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=9628"},"modified":"2015-11-04T09:09:34","modified_gmt":"2015-11-04T15:09:34","slug":"on-using-nanowrimo-as-intended","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=9628","title":{"rendered":"On Using NaNoWriMo as Intended"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the dawn of day four (of NaNoWriMo), and a new liveblogger! (Not new. You know me. I’ve been here\u00a0forever<\/em>.) Since you haven’t met my novel yet, let me start you off there:<\/p>\n

\"NaNoWriMo<\/a>
I just really wanted to write about twilight sleep<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are a lot of things to say about the challenges of writing a story set in 1914 in a city I’ve never visited, but I think we’ll come to that next week. This week, let’s talk about what I really hope to get from this month.<\/p>\n

My goal this year has been developing a less frantic process, and that really culminates for me here during NaNo. In years past, I’d write and write and write until I was exhausted — and I’d be fried by the end of November. I wouldn’t work on anything for months, and tended to spend the rest of year poking my writing at a plodding pace. I’d say I had no ideas, and just resign myself to only being a NaNoWriMo writer.<\/p>\n

Two things are different about this year for me.<\/p>\n

The first was that I submitted a short story to a magazine\u00a0and subsequently had my first short story published this summer. While I didn’t instantaneously become Ashley M. Hill, Extremely Serious Author, I did find myself thinking,\u00a0Hey, maybe people could actually like what I write.\u00a0<\/em>So I’ve started to be tiny amount more serious with myself.<\/p>\n

The second was that I started keeping a checklist of my ideas when I had them. I use Google Keep, so that I have one note that is my checklist, and then write any additional notes in a different note when necessary. And as it turns out, I have\u00a0a lot\u00a0<\/em>of ideas. They’re not all novel ideas, but they’re all stories to be told.<\/p>\n

I just have to get into the habit of telling them.<\/p>\n

So this year I’m working on writing to a logical stopping point, and then stopping when it feels right. Instead of forcing myself to keep going further and harder, I save my progress, log my word count, and do one of the many other tasks that fill my evenings. I have a lot of things to do with my day-to-day life. I have to make sure my son is taken care of half of the time. I need to meet my other, non-writing goals. Sometimes I want to read. My boyfriend recently bought me Don’t Starve for the PS3, and I need time to enjoy that.<\/p>\n

If I can do all of that stuff and only lose my mind once in a while, I can also find time to write.<\/p>\n

The teal deer version —<\/strong>\u00a0I’m doing with NaNoWriMo this year what Chris Baty intended: finding out how being a writer can fit into my life filled with social stuff, family stuff, and a day job.<\/p>\n

(P.S. My stats are fine, if unremarkable. <\/a>I ended day one with a buffer, and have written ~1600 words each day since, so I’m staying just ahead of the curve. I’m usually at about 1.25 par for the day.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the dawn of day four (of NaNoWriMo), and a new liveblogger! (Not new. You know me. I’ve been here\u00a0forever.) Since you haven’t met my novel yet, let me start you off there: There are a lot of things to say about the challenges of writing a story set in 1914 in a city […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[636,733,875],"class_list":["post-9628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nanowrimo-2","tag-liveblog","tag-nanowrimo","tag-process-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}