Prepping The Two Important Little Barz

Just about to jump into NANOWRIMO writing with two feet in a way that I haven't been doing with the web site this year.

But I did just play around with the widgets a bit and came up with the two most important ones, the two Word Wars I'm involved in. Whenever I write that the BBS in me wants to come out and spell it Word Warz.





and





Oh, it is so on this year!

I actually finally went to CVS at 6:00 p.m. or so today and got my writing notebook and am ready to hit the keyboard running. But I fear this is the year the keyboard runs me over. I still don't have any clue what will fill that notebook. Last year at this time I already had central characters and a basic outline of the first five chapters or so.

This year I don't even have a name for the character the novel opens with. I know it's going to be someone who avoids any situation that he (though I'm sure there will be a female protagonist at some point) thinks will be stressful or, more to the point, generous.

Whether this character will end up being a hero, an anti-hero, or just a casualty is beyond me at this point. I guess it will be up to how much I like the name. Though I think again, especially with this year's topic, that I'll have difficulty killing off any character.

That is, despite the fact that the whole thing takes place during a cataclysmic disaster. Oh, this is going to be a long November.

Finally Writing About NANOWRIMO When It's Almost Here

RETENTIVEWRIMO IS BACK ON THE WEB! :)

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So tomorrow is apparently Halloween. I've done absolutely nothing to prepare a costume or anything so I'm not going to dress up for work. As far as I know, there are no parties so I'm not going to dress up for any of those either.

I think I'll just watch the NBA double header and actually think about what I'm going to write for NANOWRIMO.

Not that I needed any more reason to write a speed novel for the fourth year in a row but today decided to sign up. So it's not just the word war against Toronto that will encourage me on but also the person who sits in front of me at work.

All it's going to take is an idea.

I was originally going to write a satire, but I'm just not in a very joking mood as of late so I think I'm going to go with the mood.

I think I'm going to do what I said I was going to do last year and write a story of survival after a disaster. It's not going to be like "The 9" or anything where it follows the survivors after the fact and it's not going to be like "Jericho" (is it fitting that NANOWRIMO starts on a Wednesday) where it's during a post-apocalyptic disaster.

I want to do something like the stories that were on television last year post-Katrina but I don't know if I can write something like that from ground level. I'm just not good at the whole action adventure getting out of sticky situation thing.

Concentrating on the mental anguish is more my game. But I think I want to tell a lot of it in flashback.

And then the next step is choosing a point of view. I'm thinking first person but that will probably go out the window.

One thing that I do have is the first couple sentences of the novel but I won't put them here since that would be cheating the word count as nothing is supposed to hit the page prior to midnight on November 1 (which is really really close).

But since I've had the opening sentence in my mind the last two years (well the last three years but three years ago I don't even count since the opening sentence was almost all I wrote), it seems to be how I should start out.

And I'm sure I'll end up writing more than 50,015 words or so. If I don't I'm going to lose pretty much every challenge that I'm taking part in.