NaNoWriMo Dreamin'

Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. ~ Author Unknown

Yesterday I worked on my NaNo project a little. I've done a character outline on my heroine and discovered that my original idea of who she is was completely wrong. I like the person she is, now, but it'll be hard for her to grab the reins and control her story... she's always been a bit of a follower.

That'll change.

I can't get as good a grip on my hero, but it's coming very slowly.

In the meantime, I searched the "dares" forum on the NaNo site and started my list of writers block breakers. I did this last year for Liv's story and it added a different flavor (and a character -- Frank). It's a hoot to read through the dares and see what you think you can use. There are currently 31 pages on the message board. I read through three and got a list of ten so far.

I've also tried to think up some scenes and have created "scene cards" in Excel. It's a reorganizable spreadsheet so I can shuffle the "cards" at will.

I've been reading through Chris Baty's book, too, and he's got some ideas of how to get ready for NaNo, though he doesn't recommend getting too much stuff done saying that if you're too invested in the story (by having put in weeks and weeks of pre-writing work) then you expect to write a masterpiece and won't let go of your inner critic. I suspect he's right to a certain degree.

I'm doing a few things he recommended in the part called "Your Book in Ten Questions or Less".

I have two more weeks to do everything else I wanted to do before NaNo starts. I'm still working through Liv's story, but the last third is ROUGH. Hopefully I can get it done in thirteen days. We'll see.

In the meantime, I'm on the jazz. (Thanks to the A-Team for that phraseology).