The inevitable encroachment of the calendar has brought, once again, NaNoWriMo around a lot sooner than I thought it would.
What with it being just a couple of weeks away now the internet is buzzing with tips and tricks for novel planning, lamentations and excitement over ideas, and all sorts of writers champing at the bit to begin their latest creation.
I’m not starting a new novel for this year (I’ve done that a couple of times and just failed) but I’m going to try and finish the first draft of Add Brimstone To Taste. Obviously I don’t intend to just get to 50,000 words of it as I’ve already got about 17,000 down at the moment that would be way too much of an advantage!
What I’ll be doing is marking down however many words I have at the end of 31st October (which had better be a decent amount more than 17,000 now that I’ve mentioned it…) and doing at least 50,000 on top of that.
I’ve estimated that Add Brimstone To Taste will probably end up at around 80-90,000 words (I thought that it shouldn’t really be more than 100,000 words so I’m going for just below that to start with) so unless I can write 20,000 words or so in the next two weeks (spoiler alert: I won’t) I will still need to write more than the 50k that NaNo is asking for.
Game Plan
My plan going forward for the next couple of weeks is to ensure that the outline is strong enough to carry me through to the end of the book (there are chapters at the moment where the outline is an ethereal ‘village fête bake off’) and give me something else to work on should I get stuck in a particular scene.
Luckily, as the internet is soaping itself up in the suds on forward planning so I’ll be trying out a variety of different methods and seeing what works for me. At the moment I’m intrigued to try out some methods outlined in the post by Chuck Wendig at his website on planning. And I’m particularly curious about ‘The One With The Roman Numerals‘ as I don’t think I’ve come across that one before and it looks like a nice way to organise things. I don’t remember learning this one in school so it might just be a US thing.
As well as that I’m also going to make sure all my software is up to date.
That sounds like a bit of a cop-out planning technique and in some ways it is, after all you only need a pen and paper to write, and in the past I have a good commute journey scribbling the next chapter in a notebook or on my phone. As my netbook slowly shuffles off the mortal coil it refuses to keep a charge in its battery and so I can only use it for about 40 minutes unplugged which is brilliant for one way on the commute.
What I want to do is to pop Scrivner on their and sync up the files on Dropbox so that I can write a bit on the train going back/forwards and then sync it up when I get home and do whatever it is I do when I get in (usually stuff my face with food) and then spend some time in the evening picking up where I left off.
So that’s the plan so far! I’ll keep you abreast of how it’s doing but so far so positive!
Alex S. Bradshaw 
