18 thoughts on “NaNoWriMo 2012: Bonus Episode 3, with Howard”

  1. Well, crap! I was going to take a morning nap with my baby, but now I’m all motivated and junk! ;) thanks, @howard.

  2. That, sir, was just what I needed. Thanks for the reality check. It’s easy to get sucked into a sort of deadline blindness with NaNoWriMo. You lose sight of the story as a goal in your determination to hit the deadline as a goal. The baldfaced statement that “missed deadline /= failure” helps me calm down and see the whole road. And I’m on track to finish on time.

  5. Now I feel bad for not having tried this year’s Nanowrimo. I was going to, but then I restarted playing WoW with my friends, and started reading a Wheel of Time. And that’s the perfect recepie for having written 1,000 words this November (I still had lots of time to write… but those are my excuses T_T). Awesome.

    Well, I think I’m just gonna pretend NaNoWriMo is in December… And with luck, keep the pacing up after that.

  7. Rui: While _National_ Novel Writing Month is in November, any month of your choosing can be Novel Writing Month. (Or, in Brandon’s case, every month. It’s insane how much writing he gets done.) The only difference between setting yourself a goal of 50 000 words in a month in any other month is you have less company in the insanity. Though you don’t necessarily have to be alone. I’m told a number of university student writing groups do their own version in some other month. (One that doesn’t have flurries of midterms and the blizzard of final exam anxiety.) I think they typically pick a summer month, since they tend to have much less to do then. December may not be the best choice – Christmas prep and the event itself can be rather distracting, but then, saying “this isn’t the month for me” is procrastination – the entire thing Nano is intended to help cure.

  9. Thanks you! Didn’t discover this until a couple of days after you posted it, but it was definitely something I needed to hear, as my word count for the month is languishing around 20k right now (4k of which was written last night during the overnight writing session my city’s NaNo community always holds at some point during the month), and I was feeling a bit down about that.

    Now I’m thinking that in some ways maybe being where I am with this is a good thing, or at least can be turned into one. Last year, I did finish on time, and was very proud of myself – and then proceeded to not write another word until sometime in January, despite the fact that my novel was actually nowhere near done (because 50k is actually a lot shorter than the length of most novels). And even then, it took me a while (and signing up for a different online writing community) before I started making any kind of regular progress again. So that deadline hyperfocus can sometimes be a problem even if you DO “win”, because it’s easy to get so distracted by that sense of accomplishment that you forget you’ve got a lot left to accomplish if you ever want to get an actual, finished novel out of this.

    This year, I’m still working on the same novel I started last year, and my overall word count – including last November, this November so far, and the 11 months in between – is somewhere over 120k. So between that and knowing that that when November 30 rolls around there is not a hope in hell I’ll have finished in any sense of the word, hopefully this time it will be easier for me to make December, and as many months as necessary thereafter, National Keep On Writing Until The Damn Thing Is Finished Month.

    1. Shortening it for tidy abbreviability: “National Keep Writing Until You’re Done month” would be “NaKeWriTilYoDoMo.”

      I like it even if it will never take off.

  10. I’m not sure it rolls off the tongue, though. Naked Write’ll y’a do mo? Wait, that’s seven syllables, isn’t it? So we can make a haiku out of it? 15 minutes gone, naked write’ll y’a do mo, and keep writing now? I don’t know, it seems to be missing something. Maybe pants?

    Well, it’s a start. Make it “International Keep Writing Until You’re Done Month” and we could have InKeWriTilYoDoMo — inky write’ll y’a do mo. Maybe that would work better?

  11. Great mind think alike. I’m not considering myself to be one of the greatest mind of history but my mind CAN create great history. And the speech of Howard is exactly like the one i told myself before starting the nano. in a way we’re thinking alike!
    But sometimes the mind forget so thank you Howard for the reminder!

  12. But can’t I at least first do a little jig to say, “Hey, I won at NaNoWriMo”? Oh pretty please? It makes me feel so shiny!

    Then after all the jigging and dancing and revelry, I’ll get back to work. Slave driver.

  13. Yay! 50 233 words! Thanks Howard! (And Mary and Dan and Brandon!) You guys can take full credit for unknowingly kicking me in the pants enough to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard in this case). I raise my glass of Cabernet Merlot to you goods sirs and madam. Well done! :)

  14. Pingback: NaNoWriMo Update: The Final Stretch | Frictional Worlds

  15. Thanks Howard. You always seem to know what I need to hear. I’m doing my Nanowrimo with a notebook and pen and am not even one tenth of the way there, but I’m just happy to be writing again. I’m hoping to join Nine (November is not enough) a local writing group, but even if I can’t it’s nice to know that everyone at Writing Excuses is rooting for us.

    Cheers,

    David

  16. Well, I just listened to your podcast – and you’re still right. Thanks!

    annarae, 43K and counting fast.

  17. Howard, you’re a born teacher. Logical, encouraging, insightful, patient–and with that elusive ability to figure out how best to explain a thing in a way that gives the listener an “aha” moment.

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