NaNo 2016 Reflection

Time for another NaNo recap! This month went by so quickly (;° ロ°)

This year I did Casanova again since I'd done some development for it since last November. I hadn't made as much writing progress as I'd wanted, so I knew NaNo was my only real chance of getting the ideas into any semblance of a working draft. This year I actually made an outline and everything and actually used it!

And I can officially say that the outline helped me through the month! I got through the outline a lot faster than I expected, so the last week or so of my writing is completely filler, but that's better than last year lol. I haven't tried to put my draft together in readable order (I made it about three days of writing chronologically before giving up) but if everything went well I should have everything I need to get from the beginning of the story to the end! 

Well, the end is still kind of open-ended, but I'm planning to fix that up after reviewing the draft. I'm also expecting to pull some of my writing from this past year (and even 2015's NaNo) to stick into the draft because there are some scenes I still like but didn't re-write this past month. 

Here's my chart on their website! I made consistently better progress than I have the previous three years. Now that I'm in the habit of writing every day, it was easier to push myself to reach the daily word count goal. And I did it up until I won! I slacked off the last four days after that lol. 

Here's what it looks like day by day.

I'm really glad that I decided to do Casanova over a newer idea. I'm really looking forward to getting it together to share with people, and hopefully someday I can maybe get it published. I've been going to Barnes and Noble a lot so that idea keeps popping up lol. Looking at all the books on the shelves is really inspiring tbh (•̀ᴗ•́)و ̑̑

This year I also did much better at staying on topic. I only wrote for Aperture once before I won. I celebrated my win by writing up an outline of Sugar Plum, which is a sci-fi Nutcracker retelling I wanted to write last December and never got around to. I don't know that I'll get around to it this year either, but at least I made a step towards it.

So yeah! I'd definitely call this month a success, and so far it looks like I can avoid the burnout I got last December. Ideally I'd love to get at least a minimal draft of Sugar Plum this month before Christmas, and then I'll jump into Casanova revisions in January during winter break. I guess we'll see how things go.

NaNo Progress: Days 1 - 8

I have four book reviews I still need to write and post ... but have this post instead.

I did actually try to write the reviews, but I wasn't making any headway on them. I'm writing this post the night of the 8th, and the election results are really stressing me out. (But really, who aren't they stressing?) I did manage to channel this anxiety into my most productive daily word count so far this NaNo. 2,788 words! I specifically wanted to beat the 2.7k I had on the 8th last year.

So far I've been doing well at beating the daily average NaNo tells me I have. I've been lucky enough to exceed 1,667 words every day, and on the 7th I even reached that goal in under an hour. I'm doing my very best to pad my word counts in case my month starts going downhill.

Luckily, I've got most of my school deadlines out of the way for right now, so I'm feeling pretty confident so far. My only worry is my outline -- while I did make one this year, and put a lot more detail in than normal, I'm going through it faster than I expected. I'm worried that I'll get to the middle of the month and have no more ideas because I've written everything I had in my outline.

Of course, last year was completely BSing any direction I had, so I'm not too worried about what will happen if I do reach the end of my outline before I expected. I can also always go through and make sure I fill in scenes that I skipped. I was doing really well at writing chronologically the first couple of days, but I'm starting to skip around again.

At this point I'm confident that I can put together at least the first few chapters and have something that can be read by someone that's not me. My ultimate goal for NaNo is to get the entire book that way, but I'm happy that I made at least a start on that.

I've been posting daily screenshots of my writing on twitter. I might compile them at the end of the month in my review blog post (or at least the ones I like the most). I'll probably make another update post in about a week since I've hit a blogging lull recently ...

NaNo Plans 2016

NaNo starts tomorrow!! I'm so excited and yet totally unprepared at the same time lol. I think that's how it always is, though.

NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words for a novel during the month of November. This will be my fifth year participating, and hopefully my fourth win! I've found that NaNo works perfectly with my writing process, so I've been looking forward to this since, like, February.

I flip-flopped with my decision for this NaNo a couple times. I was torn between some new ideas I've had and doing a complete overhaul of Casanova, which was my NaNo last year. One of my new ideas seemed like it would be a lot of fun to tackle, but I also knew that based on my track record so far this year, NaNo would be my only hope to get any revisions done for Casanova. I haven't made nearly as much progress this year as I hoped I would.

So Casanova won the decision.

"But isn't that cheating?" you might ask. To purists, sure. It's not a brand-new-sparkly idea. But I'm not breaking any NaNo core rules -- I've never used old writing or writing for outside projects to count towards my word count goal during the challenge.

My ideas for Casanova have changed a lot since last year, where I was essentially just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if anything was good enough to stick. I've gotten a much better sense of the characters and the plot, and I have a much better understanding of the setting after our trip to Dallas in December. (Which, honestly, I'm still in shock about. If nothing else I felt like I needed to pick Casanova again to honor that lucky break and the jump my parents took on the project.)

This year I'm actually going into NaNo with an outline!! I honestly don't think I've done that before. The past years that I've won have been complete literary abandon, as they say, and in the past three years that I've won I haven't been able to piece together an actual manuscript. I've got a bunch of writing, and a lot of ideas that I've ended up keeping, but nothing that can be read beginning to end.

My hope this year is that I can attack Casanova with a little more purpose this time and get at least one draft of every single scene I know I need to make the story flow from start to finish. I have a feeling I'm going to resort to a lot of bare-bones, uninteresting narration just to make sure I at least state what's happening rather than skip over it completely. I want to have something that I can hand off to someone and not feel like there's a whole bunch of unexplained stuff that I need to mention before they start reading.

My biggest challenge (aside from keeping focused) is going to be managing my time effectively. I've been doing a really poor job of it recently and I know it's going to take a lot of sweet tea and sheer determination to get me through November lol. I also have three final projects that I have to get done during the course of the month ...

Here's to hoping for a successful NaNo!

Camp NaNo Reflection: July 2016

Another Camp NaNo has come and gone! I only mentioned that I was doing it this month in passing, so here's some more detail about how my month went in terms of writing.

I did Casanova again with the goal of 15k, which was my initial goal in April before I bumped it up to 18k. I didn't change my goal this time (mainly because it never crossed my mind). I still reached 21,594 words by July 31st!

My word counts this month was a lot more varied than they were in April. I reached 15k on the 18th and started slacking off after that point lol. I also struggled a lot with finding things to write about, for both Casanova and Aperture, because July was kind of a lull in my summer and I didn't have too much in real life experiences to draw from. (The 3rd is a complete outlier. I'm still not quite sure how I pulled it off.) 

I still managed to write more than 1k for Casanova on four different days this month! The 31st was definitely a surprise. I got an idea and I was able to run with it a lot further than I was expecting. Overall I'm happy with my word counts for July. 

As for the writing itself: I made some more progress on the story and the characters, but I still haven't gotten around to writing the first chapter OTL. I definitely have a better idea of how to write it and how to fit it into the progression of events, but I need to work up enough inspiration to start picking at it. I'm still hoping I can get it done before I go back to school on the 29th. (Holy crap I'm not ready.)

In other writing- and success-related news, I passed my driver's license test yesterday!! I'm a fully licensed adult!!

Long story short, I resisted getting it for very close to a year, but I realized I would be inconveniencing my parents and my friends by continuing to dig my heels in. Also, I wanted to beat some of my friends to the punch. I have a really strange sense of competition. And some really lazy friends. 

One of the (many other) influencing factors that pushed me to finally book the test was actually Toni and Carter, the two main characters of Casanova. I've been writing so many scenes of Toni driving, and almost as many regarding Carter's reliance on others because he refuses to get a license. I finally got tired of doing the same thing as Carter and decided being more like Toni would be better. 

So, I can officially say that my writing has made me suck it up and do some Adulting. 

The next NaNo event is the Big NaNo in November. I haven't decided on what I'll be doing this year; I could continue my trend and try re-drafting Casanova, or I could do something new and try drafting a sci-fi Nutcracker retelling idea I've had for a while. I've still got a couple months to decide. 

If you guys participated in Camp NaNo this past month, I'd love to hear how it went for you! 

Camp NaNo Plans April 2016

This is my 5th Camp NaNo! I love the November NaNos to death, but I think Camp NaNos are a little more fun. They're more flexible with word counts and they usually happen twice a year c: And cabins are really fun even if I never talk to my cabin mates OTL

In case the picture wasn't enough of a clue, I'm going to be working on Casanova this time! I realized during NaNo 2015 that I wasn't nearly as prepared as I needed to be. My plan was to work hard behind the scenes between December and March so I could attack the April Camp NaNo and fill in all the holes I left in my first draft.

... which didn't really happen. I've been doing really well with writing every day, but I haven't done as much research and planning as I was hoping. I've still got a couple days to catch up, so hopefully I'll step it up! (Probably not.)

My word count goal is 15k, which is 500 words a day. That's pretty low of a goal for me, but I'd rather have a realistic goal than overshoot and then fall short. I'm also going to have a lot of school work in April as the semester gets ready to end the second week of May.

I'm doing the same thing as I did in November and only counting Casanova towards my word count goal. I'm hoping that I can reach 25k total including Aperture and any of the other stories I work on, and I also have a stretch goal of writing 18k for Casanova, assuming everything goes well this month.

I have a couple more Camp-related posts coming up in the next month or so! I don't know if you can friend people like you can on the main NaNo website, but here's my profile if you wanna see my progress or send me a message! I'd love to hear from other people participating this April! ♥

Casanova: After-NaNo Reflection

Like I mentioned before, here's my after-NaNo reflection focusing on what I learned about Casanova (and my own writing) during the course of NaNo!

First up, I learned that I need a lot more pre-writing with my newer projects. I've been jaded because of how long I've been working on Aperture. I wrote a couple thousand words for Casanova over the summer, but my sense of the story wasn't as nearly as concrete as I needed it to be. I honestly ran out of my original ideas and plot bunnies by the 13th.

(You can actually see this in my masterdoc. The scenes get progressively shorter and less descriptive until they're almost all dialogue. It's interesting to see and reflect on.)

I've also learned that I suck with plot-driven novels. Aperture is character-driven: there's no overarching plot to it other than the characters growing. Casanova is the opposite. It was supposed to be about Toni completing three tasks in order to "earn" Carter's soul back.

So yeah, there's very little action in Casanova so far. I skipped a bunch of scenes I knew I needed eventually because the whole thing was too structured, and I knew I didn't have enough knowledge in order to make it work.

I also relied on placeholders a lot this time, which turned out really helpful. Only six characters have names in Casanova so far. (Six and a half if you count the Casanova's nickname.) For everyone else, I used "(xx)" so I would be able to catch it easily in re-reads.

Now, in hindsight, I should've used more descriptive placeholders, because there are a couple that I can't remember who they're supposed to refer to. I stuck to (xx) because I could ctrl+f the masterdoc at the end and find how many times I used placeholders. The answer is 597 times, by the way. I haven't checked what it is now that I've replaced Cynthia's placeholders with her name.

(It took me 124 pages to decide on her name. Casanova's first draft is only 182 pages. Also, she's named after my friend @jouycemanor, who was my co-designer on our school's lit mag (ღ˘⌣˘ღ) )

Just like with Aperture, my favorite part of writing this month has definitely been all the dialogue scenes. I personally think that the vignettes with dialogue alone are some of the strongest things I write.



I surprised myself by coming up with new details for the story. The biggest (and most helpful) was giving Toni the power to teleport. I'd known teleporting was going to have to play some kind of role, but I wasn't initially expecting to give Toni the ability. It helped me out a lot in terms of word count -- if I got stuck, I decided to stick Toni and Carter in a different city. Usually Las Vegas. They ended up in Las Vegas a lot.

Something I also didn't expect was Toni's deadpan sarcasm. Carter had it from the start, but Toni was supposed to be a lot less sarcastic than he was. And that didn't happen at all. I think it's actually better that way. I have a hard time toning down my sarcasm when I write.

Toni and Carter also started resembling people I know. Toni's was entirely accidental, and I think I'm going to try and remove some of her resemblance. (I base a lot of characters in Aperture off people in real life, and I don't really want to do the same in Casanova.) Carter's was a little more intentional in that I borrowed a few aspects of someone I know in order to design his background, and I didn't realize that said person had also influenced how I perceived Carter's appearance.

I got a copy of my masterdoc printed out at Staples on the 1st. Part of the reason was because I like editing on paper rather than on screen, but a big part of it was also being able to hold up this monstrosity and say, "Look! I wrote all this!!" (My friends can attest to this. I didn't shut up about printing it out for, like, three days.)

By the time this post goes up, this copy will be with us out in Texas! (That was another reason I got it printed.) I'm really looking forward to seeing Arlington, Texas, where I decided to set Casanova. I've already been on a writing research trip, but this one will be a lot different -- I feel much more organized and focused. I have a lot more to do in a shorter amount of time.

I'm hoping to have a blog post about our trip to Arlington up on the 24th, so please look forward to it! ♥ If you guys did NaNo, I'd love to hear about what you learned about your stories over the month!