Nanowrimo 2013 Recap

Hi there, friends and followers, it’s me again! I know I’ve been updating you every Wednesday, but still it seems like I haven’t had a chance to just share on this blog since I started the Nano Spotlights. So…

I had such a blast doing nano this year! My region is so awesome, I was running around doing four write-ins most week, having a great time with fellow writers, cheering each other on. We did an Intra-region challenge this year, central Hamilton versus East/South versus West/North. The West/North tribe won by a small margin; I was on the East/South team, which took an early lead and then fell behind badly, but I don’t care, I had fun anyway.

I’d planned to do a ‘Triangle of Rebellion’, finishing two Camp Nano books and starting sample chapters for a third novel manuscript. That took me to 50k, and then in the last week I wrote a short story and started another one, turning my triangle into a very irregular pentagon. Here’s the breakdown of my sixty thousand words and change, by project:

• Opening chapters for “Measuring Alien Love on a Kitchen Scale”: 26,078 words
• Ending for “The Aurigae Express”: 19,232 words
• Ending for “The Witches of Arion”: 5,492 words
• “Soldiers”, complete short story draft: 7,248 words
• Opening scenes of “Beauty”, (the short story with the horses): 1,975 words

Let’s see, what else can I tell you about? November started in a kinda strange way, as I’d known it would, thanks to the Reversed Polarity Doctor Who convention in Toronto.

Guest Post: I’m in a Bag of Holding!

Hey, everybody. Something really cool that I’ve just been waiting for has arrived – my guest post over on The Geektastics Bag of Holding. Rhianna has interviewed me about Nanowrimo, writer’s block, zombie apocalypses, Firefly, and other really cool things. So come check it out, and then wander around the rest of her shiny new blog!

A tale of two Waffle-paloozas

Well, National Novel Writing Month ended on a random but fun note here in the Greater Hamilton area, which is certainly appropriate. For a few years we’ve been doing ‘Waffle-palooza’ on the last night of November – an occasion to gather together at a Williams Coffee location, type madly to reach 50k or whatever other end-of-the-month goals we have in our sights, and then celebrate by ordering Belgian waffles.

This year, since there was a regular Friday write-in at the Burlington Power Center Williams, it was agreed that this should be the venue for Waffle-palooza 2012. It was next door to a dessert joint called Demetre’s that also had great Belgian waffles. And since my Co-ML is out of town, Waffle-palooza was all on my watch.

The weather forecast said scattered flurries throughout the day. Yesterday afternoon it began to really snow – not a ferocious blizzard, but more than flurries. More than anybody was prepared for.

I left work just before 5 pm, crawled the two and a half kilometers through crazy traffic, and tried to take a shortcut between one Power Center parking lot and another that was much too steep and slippery to drive up. Back out onto the main road the wrong way, an illegal U-turn to get going north, (well, okay, more of a three-point turn, but it worked out alright,) and I finally got to Williams around six-twenty, to find one of the Burlington write-in regulars and two of his friends, who had just gotten there by bus a few minutes earlier.

Some early Nanowrimo wrap-up stuff.

Well, we’re kinduv into the eleventh hour of the eleventh month here… 😉 I’ve got one more Nano Spotlight ready to go for tomorrow, so today I thought I’d ramble about some general Nanowrimo stuff, looking back at the month.

My first year as a Nanowrimo ML. I had a blast, helping plan the Kick-off and taking the lead at write-ins when Gale wasn’t around or wanted to get to writing. When I was in Hamilton, I was racing off to at least 4 write-ins a week, (Sunday, Monday, Thursday, Friday,) and while in San Francisco, I crashed 3 write-ins in four days, plus the Night of Writing Dangerously. I made some new friends, got to spend time with familiar faces from long ago, and a lot of words done.

My new target for the month is 64,000 – a little less than I made last year. It’s also just over 10k more than the finishing word count of “The Snow Job”, and 10k sounds like a nice number of words for sample chapters, so that’s what I’ll be pushing for with my Missing Gnomes at the write-in tonight and the big Wafflepalooza write-in/party tomorrow!

I think I’m going to leave you with some favorite photos from my trip to San Francisco. The full photoset is up on flickr.