Danica - Nov 3, 2008
Are you in collaborative writing project? What is the goal?
It’s to pick up the writing habit. it’s part of the www.nanowrimo.org project. Everyone just attemps to write 50,000 words in a single month.
With just under two weeks of writing left for Nanowrimo I have reached over 31,000 words in that space of time. That’s an average of 1750 words a day. It’s been a good experience so far and its now that I’m starting to worry about the proofreading part. It takes long enough to proofread an essay or dissertation, let alone 50,000 words from a document such as this one. I did feel good about reaching those 30,000 words. The chapters have grown in length and I have experimented with dialogue. I have started to think about narrative in more detail and I know that there are a few things that I would do differently. There is one thing that surprises me. Whilst a lot of people are aiming to write for Nanowrimo most of them are slightly behind the word per day count. Some are really behind. I read that last year 15% of those that took up the challenge did not complete the task. I wonder what the percentage is this year, and how many have participated. We’ll see how it feels when I hit at least 50,000 words. How will I celebrate getting that far into writing a story? Not long left anyway.
I always go to social media events and meet a lot of geeks who love to use new technology such as twitter, seesmic and more. For once it’s a little different. I’m in Fribourg where I’m surrounded by writers. There are a lot of PC rather than Mac computers. The hot chocolate is good and the city is nice. 
At the time of writing there have been two word wars. The concept is simple. Write solidly for five minutes at a time and see who has the highest word count. So far I’ve written 313 and then 328 in two sessions, not bad. Word count is now over 24,000 words.
I’m enjoying the process of writing for Nanowrimo and to get some ideas I’m looking at maps offered up by google.
View Larger Map It’s quite funny because until five minutes ago I had not yet looked at the city of Pompei as seen from the sky although I’ve walked the streets many times. I thought that you too might enjoy this.
And so I reach 20,000 words after 12 days, not quite as good as I had hoped but good nonetheless. The story is developing well and there will be quite a bit of re-writing to be done but I can depend on some friends to help with that. [caption id=“attachment_815” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“20,000 words for Nanowrimo”]
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[caption id=“attachment_806” align=“aligncenter” width=“499” caption=“the progression”]
[/caption] I’m not doing too badly. I’m 1000 words ahead of the minimum per day if you take the 1667 word per day rule seriously. Might work up to 20,000 tonight. I’m just 4000 away…
50,000 words is a nice goal. I’ve already got ten thousand of those words in a document on google docs. My Nanowrimo attempt is exploring social media, new technology and the effect it’s having on human interactions. So far the ideas have been flowing. 5600 words the first day, 8000 the day after that and now over 10,000 four days in and I still have some writing time. I’m really looking forward to writing the eighty percent that remain because it’s a learning curve. I’ve started making the chapters longer and attempting to elongate the scenes. I want to create an idea and elaborate. I don’t want to skip from one character to the other. Two people already want to help me with the project but I really don’t want to start editing till I have the first fifty thousand words typed out. Nanowrimo isn’t just about me though There are quite a few people working on the project at the same time. Many of them are still struggling with ideas. Some are speaking about foregoing the social life to progress as far as possible. A few people have reached 10,000 words. It’s a funny month for all of those deciding to take one of the national challenge month to fruition. There’s blogging, writing, podcasting, vlogging and I’m not sure what else.