Nanowrimo Day One

Hello, all! For those of you who get bored with Nano-update posts, I'm going to try to keep this brief, but I'm also planning to use this space as a way to "take a break" without taking myself away from the keyboard. If I start surfing the net, I may never go back.

So far the Church of Book and I are getting along pretty well. Around 11pm last night, I realized that I wanted things to go in a different direction, but that was a whole hour before Nano started, so no problem, right? (Incidentally, let me introduce you to Seshat, the Egyptian goddess of writing, wisdom, and knowledge, also known as the Mistress of the House of Books.)

This year's process is a little different from previous years. Anyone who knew me in college knows that for big papers, I would draft them long-hand (so many trees died for the sake of my senior thesis), and then typed them up later. This was in part because it forced me to edit when I retyped it, but primarily it was just easier for the words to flow if I were physically writing them. I decided to give that a shot this year. It seems to be working reasonably well - while I find myself wanting to edit a bit when I type it up, for the most part I end up adding in words that I had thought of when I was writing it, but apparently the message never made it down to my hands to write the words down. I used Scrivner to outline what scenes I wanted to write, so I have a basic idea. Then, out came the sticky notes:

And yes, one of my scenes is titled "Training Montage"

I've got enough notes on here to help me remember what's supposed to happen, so I won't have to go to my computer and look it up when I'm starting the next scene. Also, this way I can flip in the notebook to the scene I want to work on easily.

I'm working on building up a cushion this weekend, as on Wednesday I'll be going in for surgery, and will be out of commission for a few days. (Possibly - it's also possible that the pain medication is going to make this novel take a turn for the AWESOME!) Either way, I may be quiet on the internets for a bit, but I'm going to try to make a post daily if I can.

Behold, the word count widget! I'll be putting it on the home page, as well:

Happy writing, all!

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