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Who's going to participate in NANO this year?

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the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Cyclone Jack on October 03, 2007, 05:14:52 AM ---Seriously...I stick to a 2000 word per day quota. On the best of these days, it's 2k (or more) of directed, fairly polished narrative. On the worst it's blathering nonsense. Mostly it's part warm up, part salvagable prose, and part meandering.

If a writer is serious, this is the way to go.

--- End quote ---

It's a way to go.

Iain Banks, to take an example of a published author who must have more than twenty novels out by now, some of them really excellent, has said quite a bit about his process in public, which seems to involve ten months or so of messing about and two months of writing in a panic, which has pretty reliably got him out a novel a year or so for the past twenty-odd years.  I'm aware of several other published authors with good careers writing good books who work in spurts.  On the other hand, there are people like Terry Pratchett, whom I have seen enough times in conventions disappear into quiet corners to write for five and ten minutes at a time that I can believe he's not writing to a quota so much as needing to fill every available quiet moment with writing; it must be very nice to be able to afford to do that.

There are some published authors who are very much behind writing every day; Stephen King and Harlan Ellison, IIRC, have been quite vehement about it in print.  And if that works for you fine.  So far as I am concerned, what matters is having some way of being sure that words are ending up in the page, and not making excuses for not writing when you can; my own pattern, of usually two to five thousand words every Friday night - sometimes moved to another night if for example it's my stepson's birthday on a Friday, and with occasional spurts of more if the inspiration takes me - seems to work fine in terms of getting a new chapter every week or two and a new completed novel every year or so.  Being vehement about having to write every day can be a bit discouraging to those of us who have combinations of jobs and family lives that just do not permit that.

blgarver:
Okay, it's on like donkey kong, as the saying goes.

I'm going to go with one of the books from my fantasy trilogy that has been stewing in my mind since I was 12.  So, I guess I'll decend into chaos with the rest of you guys next month.  I'm excited.

Kiriath:
My plan is a spy thriller with a renegade Macross Plus-esque AI, master races, guns which create diseases and a hero who I should probably make a little less similar to Shadow from American Gods.

Oh yeah, I feel excited. First I have to finish the novel I'm working on this month...

caynreth:
I'm in for another year. No clue what sort of project this time round...we'll see what comes out of my head come Nov. 1st.

BlueStocking:
I'm doing it for the first time this year.  I'm kinda doing a practice run right now as I have a story I plan to finish by Halloween.  It may not be good enough to submit to anything, but it'll be finished by golly.


I dunno what I'm going to do yet...maybe something with a vampire as the main character?  Or something post-apocolyptic (been watching Dark Angel re-runs on Sci-Fi *shame*)?  Simply because, of all the half-written cramp on my laptop, those are the only things I haven't done XD  Well, aside from regular fiction.

Or maybe I'll re-write that horror story I was writing about the river mermaid...I kinda lost the file, so I'd have to start from scratch anyway XD

EDIT: I know what I'm doing now.  Vampiric mermaids that are somehow involved with nanobots.  I'd say how, but that'll give away part of the story :D  Oh...this is gonna be fun.

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