The main tools I used on my computer were Scrivener, LeechBlock and SimplyNoise. The main things that helped offline were coffee*, a daily word-count requirement, and a few real and virtual writing buddies. The main things I avoided were how-to-write articles and editing as I went. The main thing I learned was that writing fiction, at least the first draft, can be a lot of fun. Also, people seem to be inordinately impressed that a person with nothing but time on her hands can string together 51,000 words in a month. I'm super impressed at anyone who did it while holding down a full-time job and/or feeding and cleaning up after other people. But me? I've got room.
I don't know if I'll do anything with the thing. It's about some foreigners in Japan, which -- hey, come back! The villain is a naturalized Japanese citizen of Canadian descent, and the heroine is a headstrong woman from the US who doesn't know (or care) a thing about Japan before she comes over in pursuit of a vague job. The company she and her fellow recruits work for turns out to be quite sinister. There's a friendly ex-yak and an unlicensed accupuncturist.
Anyway, it was fun. A lot of people I talked to said they'd been thinking of trying NaNoWriMo sometime. I had heard of it a long time ago and thought, There's something I'll never do! But then the day before it started this year I thought I'd give it a try, and the next day I thought I'd keep going for another day or so and here we are. I figured out the plot, such as it is, in the third week. It might want some revision.
*Everyone always says "Coffee! Ha ha!" and I felt compelled to include it, too, but more because I did a lot of writing in coffee shops than because I was staying up all hours alternating between pounding caffeine shots and tearing out my hair. I think we novelists** like to project the latter image, but, unusually for me, I did most of the work*** during daylight hours.
**Oh, please.
***It also feels silly to call it work in this case.
5 comments:
Atta girl!
omg I want to read this.
Congrats again!
Coffee not Ha! Coffee OMG NEED.
Hey Sandra,
Good for you writing a book! Something I've always wanted to do but somehow never had the time or found the subject to write about.
Why don't you think about releasing it on a Kindle version?
Also if you don't mind me asking what was your daily word count target?
Kris
Caroline! Thanks for helping keep me on track. Maybe I should revise to say, coffee was no more or less necessary than it *always* is.
Kris, thank you. The daily target to hit 50k words is 1,667. Of course, as soon as you miss it one day, it goes up fast and is hard to get caught up. I had a few 4000-word days out of necessity to balance out the zero days and the only-several-hundred-word days.
an ex-yak?? like the animal? do i need to buy the book to find out how this works out?
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