July WIP Challenge: Day 3 Check In

[lexicalcrow]

Day three is over, at least where I am. Were the muses kind to you today?

What did you do today?:
- Write
- Edit
- Send to beta
- Post
- Plan/daydream/research/write scenes in your head
- Procrastinate
- Something else I will describe in comments.
Today's question: Since Camp NaNoWriMo's just launched, I'm curious whether any of you have done NaNoWriMo before, or have signed up for Camp NaNo? If you've done it before, did you write fanfic? Did it ever end up posted somewhere? Or is it still sitting on your hard drive, never to see the light of day? If you haven't done NaNo, would you ever consider trying it, or is 50k words in a month too daunting, even for fanfic?

(For those unfamiliar with National Novel Writing Month - NaNoWriMo - it's a writing challenge that runs in November and the goal is to write a 50k word novel in a month. Camp NaNo just launched this year and plans to run July and August. They also have Script Frenzy in April for script writing.)

Comments

[terajk]

I finished a draft of my kink_bingo fill! Yay!

I signed up for NaNoWriMo last year, but totally froze and wrote no words. (It was just as well, since I had no plot).

[lexicalcrow]

Awesome! I've still only finished two kink_bingo fills. Need to do moar. D:

Yeah, some people do NaNo better with plots, others (like me) just ramble on and hope a plot emerges eventually. XD

[raletha]

I signed up for NaNoWriMo twice. The first time, I hit the 50K word goal, but 50K was not my whole story. The incomplete drafty mess has been lurking untouched pretty much ever since. I wrote very much seat of my pants with only a vague premise to go on. It was AU fanfic.

The second time, I was trying to convert a story idea I had been developing as fanfic to original fic and stalled pretty early on. I didn't finish that year. Too much self-inflicted performance pressure, I think.

[dragonfly]

I've done NaNo twice. I made the 50k goal both times, but neither novel is really finished. In fact, in the rewrite of the second one I took out all but 17k words. ::eyeroll::

The first one might count as Bible fanfiction, but the second one was truly original.

I do recommend NaNo, but I also recommend having a good outline ready before you start. Otherwise you risk writing yourself down a dead-end path you'll just have to delete later, as I did.

[curuchamion]

I did a NaNo-type thing this past May - started with a few characters and no plot, and managed to hit my word goal and come up with a fair few subplots, yet. It's sitting around waiting for me to make a few decisions I need to make before I start rewriting.

[lexicalcrow]

Oh, awesome. :D Yeah, the revision is usually a lot of work, but it is worth it if you can stick with it long enough to get it done. I know it took me two years (and two NaNos) and another two years of editing to get my first NaNo novel finished and posted. Not that I'm trying to scare you. D: (It ended up being 130k long. No wonder it took so long. XD)

[littlebutfierce]

I did some writing -- possible ficlet for my mundane_bingo card (even if the comm's dead) -- & a little bit of editing. Hope to do some more today.

I've done Nano before, & won twice (possibly 3 times? I think only twice). Never did anything w/it, & it was before I started writing fic. I don't know if I would do it again for fic, just b/c most of my storylines are not the 50k type. ^^;;;

[lexicalcrow]

Man, I love some of the cards for mundane_bingo. It is a pity the comm's a bit dead though. I hate it when that happens. wtf27 died/the mod went AWOL before I could get my shiny banner for finishing my table. :(

Yeah, I can understand that. It does take a certain kind of idea to stretch that far, but I've seen more people choosing to do collections of short stories too over recent years, so that can be a way to avoid having a single 50k plot. I haven't tried it though. My ideas are long enough as it is. I think I am far too prolific for my own good.

[jagnikjen]

Oh, let's see . . . I worked on my latest HP fic and posted an HP drabble over at fanfiction.net and got a scathing review. :(

I've never participated in any NANOs what-so-ever. Never felt the need.

But I'm off to shoot tons and tons of fireworks in a little bit. And when I say tons, I mean it--about $5K worth!! (We own a store and can't sell this year due to a ban. So we're going to shoot instead--in a different county where there is NO ban!! :))

[lexicalcrow]

Aww. :( Scathing reviews are no fun at all.

Fair enough. NaNo isn't for everyone. :) Have fun with the fireworks. Don't go setting anything on fire. :D

[in_lighter_ink]

Today, I did some edit-y type tweaking and posted a whole bunch of commentfic to m'journal and to AO3.

I've at least started NaNo for the past five years: made it the first year with a horrible, self-indulgent therapy fanfic (in which I projected all of my issues onto my poor main character and let him deal with it). Never, never shall it see the light of day, but writing it was pretty cathartic! The next three years didn't go so well -- I was in grad school, and November was the height of term paper season -- but I succeeded last November! Well, in spirit, anyway. Instead of one 50k thing, I wrote a bunch of short stories, one of which is an AU fic that I'm very, very slowly working on cleaning up enough to post. I'll be trying again this year, I think, for I have characters! (No plot yet, of course, I'm okay with that. ^^)

[lexicalcrow]

Awesome! Commentfic is always fun. I don't do enough of it. Too many other things to do. At some point, I'm sure I will find a reasonable balance between all the ideas I have and what I can actually realistically write. XD

Congrats on finally winning! :D I've seen a few people now writing collections of short stories for NaNo instead of one piece. 2011 will be my sixth NaNo, and apart from 2008, I've won every year. But I've ended up writing two novels in the process. The first was written for NaNo 2006-2007 (with some work in the middle), and it was a dystopian fanfic AU that took me til 2009 to finish writing, posting and editing. It ended up being about 130k all up. The second is still a WIP, written for NaNo 2009-2010, and it's a Georgian/Regency steampunk AU fanfic that's at about 110k atm? Not sure when it'll get done, though. Maybe this year, except I have an idea for a gangster AU fic instead. So IDK.

[pkc_creative]

Done a bit of editing tonight on ficlet, hopefully I can post it tomorrow after work and I also rewrote 1 chapter from my WIP because it was bugging me.

I've done nano twice and failed both times. First time I tried writing original fic but I got sick of my characters around 800 words. Second time I tried writing fan fic but life got in the way and it was stuck at less than 500 words.
The camp nano thing looks like a good idea, will have a look another day.

[lexicalcrow]

Good luck with the editing. Rewriting is always tough, but sometimes necessary to get where you want to be. I just throw them into deleted scenes files in case I want to use them later on for something. An AU of an AU or something.

NaNo isn't for everyone, I'll grant you that. And you do need to stick with it. Doing some planning or research beforehand does help though, because then you're not just going in blind. It did take me four years to finish my first NaNo fic, which I started in 2006. I am weirdly persistent at times.

I don't have any time/inclination to do Camp NaNo this time round, but maybe when I have less to do. I've got a pile of fiddly projects to get done before uni starts in August, so no time for big single projects atm. It sounds like a good idea though. The NaNo forums are always a good resource.

[pensnest]

I've never tried a NaNo, November not being a very promising time of year for me to get tied into writing to that extent. Though it's not a bad idea...

I mostly procrastinated today, but did write a teeny little bit, which is at least a Start.

[lexicalcrow]

It's not always easy for me either. November is secon semester exam month at uni. Not a great time to be writing 50k at the same time as doing exam study, I can tell you. I think I keep doing it because it never occurs to me NOT to do NaNo. I am possibly crazy.

Antyhing's better than nothing, though! And sometimes you need to procrastinate a bit while the story sorts itself out. Here's hoping for more words tomorrow. :)

[msmcknittington]

Yesterday I signed up for 750 words (at like 11 PM), and I wrote 190 words before midnight and then 655 after midnight, for a total of 845 words. Which is AMAZING for me. I doubt that I'll be able to keep it up for the entire month, but it's a really promising beginning.

I've done NaNoWriMo a couple times, but I've always been really disappointed with what I come up with. It's fun if you fly by the seat of your pants and are good at it, but if you're a slow writer then it doesn't work out so well. (I prefer "methodical" to "slow", though. :P) I find that with the stuff I produce for NaNo, I have to do so much editing at the end to make it even readable enough to send to a beta reader that it's just not worth it. It's too disappointing and frustrating to look at what I've written and know that I can do better than that. I also don't always have the time to write gobs on a daily basis -- that "REAL writers find time to write EVERY DAY" thing is ever so much beautiful bullshit -- so NaNo is a poor choice for me.

My previous years' NaNo novels are sitting on my hard drive, waiting to be finished and edited into submission. I have shared sections with my friends after I've edited them a bit. I got good feedback, at least!

Since I also did not answer the last two days' questions, this month I'm working on the same novel-length thing I worked on last month, which I am pecking away at approximately at the speed of glacier. But every word is a word closer to the end, right? It will not write itself!

As for canon, I usually end up getting pretty speculative and writing off the beaten path, so I kind of just make up what I need in a reasonable fashion. I try to stick to the nature of the characters and the tone/nature of the original work, but if there's something missing or the world isn't kind of sparsely constructed, then I work with what it's the canon and construct what's missing for my needs.

[bay_alexison]

Got a little over 600 words done for my ladyfest fic. I want to think a bit how I want the conversation to go before I get back to writing again.

I signed up Nano a couple times, but LOL couldn't even pass a 1000 words. I think the thing is I need to think up a bit of where I want the story to go before I'm able to write it. I'm considering going for Camp NaNo for August and write both my Big Bang ficand help_japan fic. I actually think the wordcount for both stories wion't be 50k, but this will let me focus on getting a chunk of writing done for both projects, at least. Most likely I'll have to do massive edits when Camp NaNo is over, but I'll at least know what needs fixing and I have time to polish both stories.