Week One: Tips and Tricks

It's fashionably late, but it has arrived.  Here is where I stand at the end of day eight:

13865 / 50000 words. 28% done!

It's crazyface, for sure.  That's my weekly word: crazyface.  Because it describes how I feel about making it to the end of WEEK ONE.  I'm still alive.  I still have all of my limbs.  My fingers are tired, but they're always tired.  They're just a bunch of whiny babies.  I have gleaned some life lessons (if writing = life, then they're life lessons, I suppose) from surviving one-fourth of November.

1) Baby steps.  Don't think of it as, "I have to write fifty-effing-thousand words in thirty-effing days."  Just typing that freaks me out.  I try very hard not to think of the number 50,000 in general.  Think of it as 1700 words a day.  Actually, what I have learned is to not think of NaNo at all through the day until the time when I sit down to write.  Because thinking about the writing psychs me out.  I don't even plot in my head.  I have two (or more) hours a day to write and those are the only hours I will even think about word count or characters or plots of my novel, period.  It's working well.  I'm playing a crafty mind game with NaNoWriMo, and I'm winning.  Greenconverses will have more to say on this matter on Tuesday, because I feel like a lot of people are stressing about their word counts.  So if you're stressing on your word counts (because I know you are; I KNOW ALL OF YOUR SEKRITS), tune in on Tuesday for inspirational speak.  Or tune in on Tuesday because you're procrastinating; whatever works.

2) Kill the Internet.  No, seriously.  You don't need it for research.  The only thing it does is make you look at the clock after Wikipedia-ing gerbils and realizing that the hour hand magically moved another notch.  Where did it go?  The Internet stole it.  The Internet is a sneaky TIME THIEF.  I have yet to master this tip myself, but I thought I would share so someone who has much better self-control than I do will be able to make good use of it.

3) If you have write-ins, go to them.  I get so much done during write-ins, because it's mildly embarrassing if your ML looks over at your screen and you're casually creeping on, "If I get 1,000,000 people to join this group, my girlfriend will let me turn our house into a PIRATE SHIP."  You obviously have your priorities straight if you're living vicariously through some guy who is a) thinking about adding sails to his house and b) promoting it on a social networking site.  And you OBVIOUSLY have your priorities straight if you actually join that group. Therefore, go to write-ins.  Did that point even make sense?  I'm going to go with it did.  Also, your ML has cool stickers.  Don't you want cool stickers?  You know you do.

4) The first and last 500 words of each day are the hardest.  Is there something to be learned from this point?  Probably not.  I'm just throwing that out there.

I don't know how everybody else feels, but I'm feeling pretty good.  NaNo is a lot less stressful than I thought it was going to be.  Not to say I haven't had my fair share of days staring at my laptop at 2 am and freaking out that I'm still at 300 words.  This has happened.  More than once.  But overall, it's good.  I'm still here, aren't I?

For everybody who is interested (which is everybody), Lisa and Laura are holding a Kindle giveaway because their fabulous mystery novel sold to a publisher and is coming out Spring 2011.  I'm not entering because I personally would probably never use a Kindle (I don't hate them, I just don't like reading on screens because I have easily stress-able eyes), but if you want to congratulate them on their wonderful book deal and/or enter the contest, please do so.

Catch you on da flip side.