6 days until NaNoWriMo. Time to disclose my plans and my organization for this big event !

My Goals

• Writing 50,000 words in english
• Finish the storyline (very important)

Software

• The manuscript will be written in a single plain .txt file
• Backup and versioning will be taken care of by Tortoise SVN / ProSVN
• My text editor will be SciTe with the wordcount addon. I also plan to use Visual C# Express (for stealth writing at work, lol)

Misc Tools

• Translations.txt : my constructed world has been created in french. I have started to translate the most used company names, weapon names, etc.
• Idea Box : if I become stuck, I'll pick an idea card and try to apply it in my story.
• Setting.txt : the weather, the way characters are dressed and their current mood at scene X are very easy to forget by scene X+1. So I'll track theses "mundane" details in this file.
• Edit.txt : No editing during NaNo, I know. But to fix things later, you have to make a note about what is going wrong (thanks The Secrets Podcast).
• Logan's excel report : an amazing Excel sheet to track your writing progress, modded by a fellow NaNo-writer Logan. It has everything from statistics and graphic charts. It will be very useful.
  

Writing process

• To insure I will finish my story by the end of NaNo, I'll use a method similar to the Snowflake one : write a summary of the entire story and expand each point until I get to 50,000.

That's it... I am preparing everything BUT my story. That's fun, that's procrastination, that's scary... and that's NaNoWriMo.

Happy Nano-preparation to all ! Don't hesitate to share your own way to prepare NaNoWriMo in the comments.

Eager to write for NaNoWriMo ? If you follow the rules, you cannot write your novel before November 1st. But you can write peripherial material. I call them mini-stories because they are short and don't interfere with the plot of your novel, but they help you to have a better vision of your characters and your world. In addition to that, if you write mini-stories regularly before NaNo, you will get the habit of writing 1,700 words a day...

Imagine you want your NaNoWriMo to be a tale of a barbarian from the dark ages who return to his motherland, only to see that it has been destroyed by time travellers tourists (worst plot ever, I admit, but I made this up live).

Here are the two main types of mini-stories.

Write in another POW
Your protagonist is the poor sad angry barbarian. But what if you write a short blurb from the tourists perspective ? How does their time machine work ? Did they have other destinations to choose from ? And what did they to do adapt to life in the dark ages ?

Write a prequel
Your novel must begin when something go wrong (in my exciting plot, that's the time travelers). Why don't you write about times where everything goes well ? Barbarian protagonist goes for a pillage or two, picks up flowers on the hillside, or builds a house. Some minor events happen : he's stung by a bee, or he's caught in a snow storm.

Last notes : mini stories remain mini stories. They will help you to know better your characters or your world, and get you in the mood for writing. But you don't want them to become a full-fledged project (not yet). So, limit your mini-story writing time to 0,5 or 1 hour, and try to finish it by this deadline. Depending on your writing speed, you'll have a 1000-2500 words story... Just what NaNoWriMo will demand you daily this November :)

Happy writing !

As a writer, you certainly have a notebook where you put your ideas. But what if your latest idea doesn't fit your current novel ? Will you dump it ? Of course not. You'll note it and move on. There's a problem in this process : retrieving individual ideas from a notebook are painful.

So enter the "Idea Box", an analog "storage system" where every idea is written on an index card. For GTD fans, it's a bit like the POIC system, without the logging orientation.

How do I build an idea box ?
Take a box and some Post-it labels. Use labels and blank cards to build category delimiters. For example, here are the categories I use : Items and places, dialogs, events, names.

How do I fill my idea box ?

1. Always carry index cards with you.
2. When an idea springs to mind, note it on a card.
3. When you come back home, file your ideas into the box.
4. Repeat steps 1, 2, 3 for a while (programmers, no pun intended).
5. When you need an idea, pick a card.
6. When you need a plot, pick many cards (ever plotted with index cards ?).

Last advice
Noveling isn't the only use of the Idea Box. You can pick cards for everything : generate ideas for your next roleplaying session, create a storyline for a video game, get inspiration for a website design or a drawing...

October 1st ! What's new ?

• It's my 22nd birthday.
• I started my 487th rewrite of my NaNo 2006.

It saddens me to say that I achieved exactly nothing between October 1st 2006 and today. I wrote 3 tiny stories (written in 1 hour each), made some drawings, started blogs, and spent the remaining time editing/rewriting my NaNo 2006 novel. I added the wordcounts of my different NaNo 2006 rewrites : it tops at 250,000 words. Pretty number. But sad result. My NaNo 2006 lies still unfinished.

My plan for October is to give my rewrite a last try. I did a summary of every plot point, every conflit and every character used in my previous edits. I ditched the bad/cheap ones and kept only the meaningful conflicts. I'll see how I can turn this into a novel during my daily commute. So... see you in the metro :)