NaNoWriMo 2011 week 2

Week two seems to be when I started actually writing this year. At the end of week 1, I had 2,329 words, averaging 332.7 words per day. After the second week I was sitting at 12,160, averaging 1,737.1 words per day for the second week. With NaNoWriMo's par of 1,666 words per day, week two looked pretty good.

The trouble I'm having now is: I have no idea where my story is going. Yeah, things are happening, and yeah, I like my characters - well, some of them, anyway - but there's no overarching plot and no strong direction this year. I have no outline and no real idea of what is going to happen next.

One thing that has helped beginning in week two has been hanging around on Facebook in the NaNoWriMo group. There are a lot of other people hanging out there, and you can usually find a word war, word sprint or something along that line. I have enjoyed two types of word sprints. The first is a timed sprint. Someone would say, for example, :00 for 15, meaning 15 minutes of furious writing starting at (whatever hour your clock says):00. The other type was a sprint to a specified number of words starting at a given time. The one I did like this was a sprint to 1,000 words. I came in second on that one, but really, I won because I had 1,000 new words in my story.

One drawback I've had this year has been the lack of a laptop. I still have the laptop from work, but its battery doesn't hold a charge and it's super-slow. Not that I need a powerful computer for writing, but it would be nice if it booted up in something less than 15 minutes. Talk about unproductive use of time at a write-in!

Par for day 14 was 23,333 words, meaning at the end of week two, I was 11,173 words behind. I hope I can keep pushing on it in week three!

State of Fear - reading

Finished "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton. I really didn't like the characters, especially the stupid lawyer main character (Mr. "I don't know") and thought the plot needed, well, something more. It's not that I'm a huge advocate for global warming and offended that he's put it in a bad light, either. I'm not, and that had nothing to do with the problems I had with the book. I just thought the characters were perhaps two-dimensional, perhaps too focused on some aspect of the story, and that the main character was an idiot.

NaNoWriMo 2011 week 1

2011's NaNoWriMo has thus far been disastrous. In the first week, I was only able to get 2,329 words. The only bright spot is that I learned how to use Scrivener, and found it to be very good for writing.

The distractions have been numerous, including the fact that my OrcSports server needs a pretty major part of it (the simulation) translated from VB to C# in order to continue working with the new web host, and I'd really like it to continue working so I don't lose all my players. I've also admittedly been playing Everquest II instead of writing, and need to spend far less time doing that. There are other distractions and excuses, but really if I want to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month, I have to change some habits and get to writing.