#NaNoWriMo2015 Diary -- Day 1


DAY 1 – Tuesday 11/3

[Note: Today is indeed November 5, not November 3 as stated above. This journal is going up a few days late because I just decided it would be a fun experiment to document my first NaNoWriMo experience. Subsequent entries will coincide with the actual day. Thank you. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.]

After agonizing (well, okay, more like thinking about) whether or not to do NaNoWriMo this year, given that I’ve never done it despite having wondered about it every year at this time for the past four or five years, I decided to go for it.

I figured that I’m going to be writing my tail off anyway to get at least three new books to market by Christmas, so why not sign up for NaNoWriMo?

At this moment, I’m in the process of signing up, reading the Terms&Conditions, the FAQ, etc.
Mostly, I’m trying to decide if I should use NaNoWriMo to continue with my three-book series I’ve been working on the past seven months, or dive in with a new manuscript I have mostly outlined and which I was working on before life happened and I diverted to this new series.

So, today is November 3rd. I guess that means I’m three days behind. Oh well.

In addition to settling on a project (continue WIP or begin new WIP?), I need to determine word count. The current WIP is three books (maybe four or five or more; who knows?) and at 100k each, that’s 300,000 words. I am committed to having them done by Christmas. I have about 80,000 words to go on the first draft of the third book. The first two books are written and need at least one more pass. So the hard part is almost over. I’ve outlined all three books using Rachel Aaron’s book From 2K to 10K, which helped A LOT. My word counts went from about 2000 a day to 6000-8000 a day on days I really focus, which, to be totally honest, has been difficult the past couple months; not entirely sure why.

Nevertheless, the dilemma is whether or not it is feasible to write a new novel for NaNoWriMo (the working title of the book I would write is “Rocket Man”) AND still get the trilogy to market by Christmas. It’s a TON of work.

The bold thing to do would be to simply jump in, calculate the daily word counts, and go for it.
Okay, back to the NaNoWriMo sign up page…

Roughly 15 minutes later…
Okay, I signed up. Rocket Man it is.
Here we go.


Okay, so I have a calendar and given that this is day 3, my word count needs to be 5000.

And check out this cool flyer the kind NaNoWriMo folks made for this year. You're supposed to print it out and stick 'em up all over town.


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