Sunday, December 2, 2012

Finishing NaNo!


First thing's first:

NOVEMBER 25TH – SUNDAY
The Thanksgiving vacation is now over. We were all packed up and ready to head out the door by noon. The extent of my writing time was used to finish up my blog post for last week before our drive home.
The drive itself was a bit chaotic. My sister followed me up in her car; with her dog driving her insane the whole way. The drive is already about 4hrs long, but with the holiday traffic we were stuck in stop-and-go whenever we got near a city. Plus, about an hour from the house my sister’s speed sensor or whatever broke on her car and she was terrified she had done something to her transmission. So I had to calm my sister, tag team between her and my mom to figure out what we should do, and then drove below the speed limit with our hazards on the rest of the way. The full trip took about six hours to complete.
I then entertained my sister to get her mind off her car, and then I unpacked. There was no way I was going to write anything. Sheesh!

NOVEMBER 26TH – MONDAY
Day two of entertaining my sister. I talked her in to taking her car to my mechanic and spent the rest of the day with Hubby, his BFF, and celestialTyrant. Sis threw a mini-party with snacks and pigs-in-a-blanket. It was fun chaos to have everyone over, but chaos also means yet again not having any time to write. Sugar! :-P

NOVEMBER 27TH – TUESDAY
So the mechanic called my sister to let her know that her speed sensor has indeed died, but as long as she doesn't push her car she should be able to use her GPS to track her speed and make it home safe. She can then get the sensor replaced by the dealership itself. Happy to have her car back, we took a trip to Walmart to pick up a few things so she could throw a second mini-party to celebrate her car being fine and CT being able to visit a second day in a row. Aaaaaaaaand then we get in our cars to drive home.... and her car wouldn't properly shift without the sensor. Terrified that she'd blow her transmission, we again dropped the car off at the mechanic's and once again I had to deal with an overly emotional sister. Thankfully, CT really helped calm her down.
Sis also got a call from the mechanic later in the day. He could get a new sensor for her. He'd bump her in front of all of his other customers so he could make sure her car was fixed by 2pm tomorrow so she could make it home in time to get back to work first thing Thursday.
With all the extra chaos, yet another writing-free day.... :-P

NOVEMBER 28TH – WEDNESDAY
Continuing the November theme of being grateful, I have to have list some things I've been thankful for this week.
1 - CT being able to visit for the third day in a row. His visits really helped calm my sister down.
2 - The mechanic doing everything he could to make sure my sister could make it home safe - and never once charged her! I'll talk more about that in a moment.
3 - Sis being able to visit in the first place! Yay!
4 - BEING ABLE TO WRITE AGAIN after a week away from the computer.
Let's start with the car saga. Sis gets a call first thing in the morning to find out that the mechanic tried calling everywhere and couldn't get the sensor, so YET AGAIN sister is a wreck wondering how she was making it home. So we started off the day with her going BACK to the mechanic so he could teach her how to drive an automatic car like it's a standard to make sure it shifts. After CT calmed her and she had one last mini panic attack right as she left she managed to make it home with no trouble at all.
But when it comes to writing, well I got an hour in first thing in the morning. I dropped Hubby off at work and then wrote while waiting for Sis to wake up. I then wrote for another hour after Sis went home. Not terribly too much, but it was better than nothing!

NOVEMBER 29TH – THURSDAY
Blockaded myself in my room for a few hours to try to catch up on my writing. I wanted to at least finish off my chapter so I had one for today's update. I got an amazing 2600+ words written! Hazzah for basil pesto hummus!!!!!

NOVEMBER 30TH – FRIDAY
The last day of NaNo. With some encouragement from Ali Luke I decided to try for half-NaNo; 25000 words. After yesterday's mad dash I only need 1400. My thing though is that I had a major issue with my characters just doing their own thing. For instance, Connor flipping out unnecessarily and apparently disappearing for a month. Now I needed to figure out how to get him back in to the story. :-P Also, I needed to figure out how Natalie discovers that she can see the jewel shards. Both issues completely halted my creativity. As of 9pm I still hadn't written anything!
After a mini-break down I blockaded myself in our room with more hummus. I was slowly word counting after each chapter. It was almost an hour of "write a paragraph, see if it's enough, than write another paragraph, see if THAT is enough, etc." I finally hit 25010, but then realized I only needed about 200 more words to hit my 1667 daily word count. After 1400 words 200 shouldn't be too much more to write. I then wrote 1730 words by the end of the day, only to discover that if I wrote 20 more I would be able to "roll over" the extra words to finish off one of the days where I only needed 30-some words to hit the 1667 daily count. By the time I finished the day it was about 11pm - when I have to go to work at 7am tomorrow - and 25,360 words in my novel!
I'm no where even STARTED in the main portion of my plot, and I only wrote on 15 days of the year. So if I had written daily I probably COULD have hit the 50,000 words and get about 1/2 way through my tale. It will be a while before I can go back to finish the story, but I'll let everyone know when I go back.
My goal is to convert everything in to a script so it's easier for me to organize my thoughts. Most of my words were description of the world of Gyateara and the magic used - which works with NaNo's goal to write as much as possible, but doesn't work for a polished story. With the script I could streamline and then switch back to prose once I have everything - including character personalities - figured out.
I also want to read through Rick Riordan's "Heroes of Olympus" series as well as Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle in order to get a better idea of how to describe the world/magic of Gyateara.
Before I work on finishing this story, however, I have the following writing goals:
1 - Supposedly there will be another Hey Arnold writing contest, this time with a Christmas theme, so I'll have to start thinking about what I want to write for that.
2 - I want to get back to working on What Is Truly Meant To Be after not updating in MONTHS.
3 - I want to see if I can get back to the second half of the July Daily Challenges.
4 - ChibiSunnie and I want to get back to working on our fanscript for The Jungle Movie.
We'll see how long it takes to get back to this story.....

DECEMBER 1ST – SATURDAY
I took a writing break! 'Nuff said!

DECEMBER 2ND – SUNDAY
As mentioned at the top of this post: IT'S THE HUBBY'S BIRTHDAY!
With all the other writing - and lack of writing ability - this week I wasn't able to write this blog post prior to today, which is why it's late.... So, so late....

Oh well, I'm off to celebrate Hubby's birthday before I have to go to work at 3:30. In the meantime, enjoy the TWO chapters I wrote this week! Go me!

No comments:

Post a Comment