This year marks my fourth NanoWrimo, and barring any disasters I intend to maintain my 100% record. For those wondering whether Nano is any use ... Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch contains a lot of ideas, characters and actual writing from a couple of my earlier Nano efforts, so the answer is yes.
The benefits of Nano are many, from thirty days of mad writing with no worries about the quality of the prose, to the understanding of family who you'll finally hear saying things like "No, he can't come to your election victory celebration. He's WRITING this month."
So, on to Nano 2008. This year I've plotted Hal 5 and will be writing a substantial chunk of the first draft. I've not written a word of fiction since Nano last year (in itself a damn good reason for me to sit down and do it again), so I suspect it's going to be a bit of 'right you, into the deep end' for the first few days. I'll live.
Enough of the pitch. Now I want to share a few links:
My Nanowrimo daily progress forms, Nano tips and the unique one-day-catchup form are all here.
yWriter4 for Windows is here. (Your mission is to install it and learn how to use it before the 1st. Ha.)
The Nanowrimo forums. They usually melt down for the first 5-7 days, but after that about 60-70% of Nano hopefuls have packed it in, and everything moves smoothly again.
Once you've signed up for Nano (and you'd better hurry), the Regions page allows you to specify your geographical location, and will then give you a link to a forum where you can meet up with nearby Nanoers. E.g. my region is "Australia & New Zealand :: Perth :: South", and we're already planning meet-ups and word wars with "Australia & New Zealand :: Perth :: North"
Finally, my NanoWrimo profile is here. If you want to run a word war widget with me, just copy and paste the following to your blog/website, replacing the [ and ] with < and >, and the ID with your own NanoWrimo ID (number, not name. It's the last part of the URL when you access your user page on NanoWrimo's site.)
[img src="http://www.nanowrimo.org/NanowrimoUtils/WordWar/84789-ID.png" /]
See you in November ;-)
Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series (Amazon / Smashwords / other formats)
2 comments:
Yeah, well, I've signed up this year due to a complete lack of inspiration over the lsat couple of months, and I'm quoting you as the reason for it, so it'd better not suck, coz unless you've moved house recently I know where you live, Perth South boy..... >:)
I'm giving NaNo another stab this year (fourth times the charm, right?) and stumbled across your website whilst looking for tips.
Hope you don't mind that I've added you as a NaNo buddy, it's always nice to watch other folks win! (And who knows, maybe this year wordcount will be contagious! ^_~;; *sheepish grin*)
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