NaNoWriMo 2020!

[Equinox]

Instead of writing a novel this year, I'm going to get some journal articles done.

I'm sure those will be just as successful (i.e., not at all). :D

[Keychain]

It's day 2 for me and I'm already behind!

[mastina]

This year I

was

gonna do NaNoWriMo.
Was.
But then the flashdrive which my novel is on--a novel I've been working on for

over eight years

--decided now would be a BRILLIANT time to malfunction. If any backup of the flashdrive exists, it's literally years old.
The good news: As far as NOTES for my novel go, I was compiling them all in a word doc. I didn't manage to get them all (I lost at least three or four word doc files), but I was able to get the vast majority of my notes down. Combined with me generally having a good idea for my chronology in my novel (I have a fair understanding of what happens, when, with what events), and this is a reasonably decent place to be.

The bad news: I don't have any surviving draft of the first draft (which contains what I wrote start to finish the first time 'round). I don't have any surviving draft of my last second draft (which got approximately 2/5ths of the way through the entire novel yet contained loosely a fair approximation of all my content). I DEFINITELY don't have the third draft, which was my most recent draft and the draft I was going to start/resume working on.

So this year I'm probably not going to short of a miracle.
My mom gave me a fair amount of potential recovery methods to sift through, although honestly some of them look a bit...
...Sketchy to say the least and I'd just rather send it to a professional to see if they can fix it even though their prognosis is grim. (The flashdrive malfunctioned, and thus, windows is refusing to recognize it. Because of this, the only way to get a fix is to actually send the drive in.) Which could potentially be expensive. I'm not sure. Even as far as professionals go, there's lots of options and it's just kinda...overwhelming.

I just want to have my novel back.

[T-Bone]

Well anyone who is doing it, or thinking of doing it, or just wants to hang out with people who are doing it, join our Discord room.

[OhGodMyLife]

Good luck everyone. I'm doing NaNo from Spain this year. ¡Estoy escribiendo!

[zakk]

This year I

was

gonna do NaNoWriMo.
Was.
But then the flashdrive which my novel is on--a novel I've been working on for

over eight years

--decided now would be a BRILLIANT time to malfunction. If any backup of the flashdrive exists, it's literally years old.
The good news: As far as NOTES for my novel go, I was compiling them all in a word doc. I didn't manage to get them all (I lost at least three or four word doc files), but I was able to get the vast majority of my notes down. Combined with me generally having a good idea for my chronology in my novel (I have a fair understanding of what happens, when, with what events), and this is a reasonably decent place to be.

The bad news: I don't have any surviving draft of the first draft (which contains what I wrote start to finish the first time 'round). I don't have any surviving draft of my last second draft (which got approximately 2/5ths of the way through the entire novel yet contained loosely a fair approximation of all my content). I DEFINITELY don't have the third draft, which was my most recent draft and the draft I was going to start/resume working on.

So this year I'm probably not going to short of a miracle.
My mom gave me a fair amount of potential recovery methods to sift through, although honestly some of them look a bit...
...Sketchy to say the least and I'd just rather send it to a professional to see if they can fix it even though their prognosis is grim. (The flashdrive malfunctioned, and thus, windows is refusing to recognize it. Because of this, the only way to get a fix is to actually send the drive in.) Which could potentially be expensive. I'm not sure. Even as far as professionals go, there's lots of options and it's just kinda...overwhelming.

I just want to have my novel back.

this post is a novel

[Klazam]

write a novel with that story at its core. a struggling writer who lost all files of his novel, and has to embark on a grand pan-American adventure to get it back, dealing with a series of shady black market nerds who specialize in the retrieval of bits thought lost forever.

[Errantparabola]

The NaNoWriMo Novel

(A NaNoWriMo Novel)

[OhGodMyLife]

That's one of the best NaNo ideas I've ever seen tbqh

[OhGodMyLife]

I'm writing drunk in the middle of the night what else is new

[T-Bone]

Hey so NaNo starts in a few days, so I am bumping the topic for great justice.

I also re-did the Discord we had for this back in 2017. If you'd like to join, the link is here. I will be your ML for MS (heh).

https://discord.gg/9BfvrY4

[Klazam]

HEY!

I'm in again this year, and im gonna be taking this seriously. see you all in discord!

[OhGodMyLife]

I'm participating but I have no expectation of hitting 50k this year. My job is not conducive to it. To cut out all the planning and plotting this would usually require I'm novelizing the Pathfinder campaign I ran to introduce my wife and several other novice friends to tabletop gaming a few years back. Session notes = chapter outlines. Convenient zany fun!

[T-Bone]

Great! Don't forget to join Discord!

[Zaphkael]

Bump! anyone planning on joining this year?

I'm going to try, though I'm pretty sure I won't be hitting 50k.

[T-Bone]

as always
I will change the thread title, and perhaps hijack some space on the MS Discord for this

[kuribo]

I'll join up with nano but I'm gong to be doing a series of shorts since I'm back to publishing those

[AGamblingPig]

I'll likely consider it and then not follow through, like in most years.

[AGar]

Ah the familiar tale of 5 days before NaNoWriMo, "Oh I should do that this year," he said with no plan or ideas in his empty head.

[Andycyca]

I may or may not do it, depending on how I feel. I used to be Municipal Liaison for my region and now... it's mutated to something I don't like. Oh well.

One of the best things I found to actually finish was to shift away from the normal perspective from 1667 words per day. In my case I switched to 5000 words every 3 days (because it more or less matched low-activity days at my job) whereas a friend of mine switched to three 500-word stretches per day, plus extra on weekends. It may seem silly, but it helps a lot when silencing the inner critic: I can just work my butt off in a single days and rest two.

For ideas, I do the short story route: a new thing for every day even if I haven't finished yesterday's. The easiest is to stick to one idea and try and find as many spins as possible (how many circumstances can I put this character in? Can I write a different genre each day? Can I put different characters through the same problems?)

Will it suck? Most likely. That's part of the spirit of NaNo

[AGar]

I actually just had an idea come to me, so I think I'm gonna try and power through it this year and see how much I get?

[Ythan]

Hey happy birthday AGar.

[Creature]

Feeling like I should try 11500 words a week (sunday to saturday) and try to fit in 4000 words in the remaining two days. Weekdays are really hard to write while I could use the weekend to write a fair bunch. So it could be like 750 words on each weekday and a minimum of 3500 words each of saturday and sunday.

I initially planned to write the first installment of a series with a dense atmosphere, but I feel like that's gonna burn me out. So I opted with a simpler but still fun idea which is to kinda rewrite a project I got about 18k words in october last year. I'll probablu use today and tomorrow to establish the plot and the scenes to write.

Edit: My calculations were off, guess I'll need 1000 words per weekday and 3750 words per weekend day and I should have two more days to fit up if needed.

[fferyllt]

Why not?

[kuribo]

I worked a 16 hour shift till 7am and I'm working till 3am tonight

But I still got 2071 words so I'm off to a decent start

Add me on nano cowards https://nanowrimo.org/participants/kuribo