nanowrimo update

I wrote over 2,500 words yesterday. Total so far: 8,204 words, 41,796 to go. See my silly cartoons in my NaNoWriMo Livejournal.





I had been worried that by being too deadline-oriented, I'd be writing too much crap. Much to my surprise, I'm pretty happy with what I've done so far. Sure, it'll need to be heavily edited since I'm not doing any editing as I write, but thus far I think I could turn this into something I won't be ashamed to send to my agent.

It's only been about a week into NaNoWriMo, but I can't help but constantly analyze why I'm able to write faster and still enjoy the process. For me, the keys seem to be:

- community support

- public deadline

- NaNoWriMo Report Card (written by Erik Benson) in which you enter your wordcount each day and all kinds of stats and graphs are automatically generated (how many words left, writing rate, percentage done, pie charts, etc.)





So of course I'm already wondering, How can I apply this to future fiction projects? I think I'm going to customize the spreadsheet a bit more for my own projects, and also look for a good online writing group. I tried a few, but they were either too big, too mean, too nice, too small, too specific, or involved critiquing. I don't want critiquing (not that there's anything wrong with critiquing; it's just not what I want in an online writing support group).

I want a supportive writing group who is deadline-oriented and not too chatty. Many of the mailing lists or online groups I investigated tended to be more social chats, where conversations were as likely to be about how someone's cat threw up a furball the previous night than writing. I'm not against social mailing lists; I just get way too much e-mail already and don't want to have to go searching for the posts that interest me.

If any of you know of a group that fits the bill and are open to new members, please do let me know, thanks. :-)





Links/News:

One year ago, the topic was "online chats".

Five years ago, I had just hired a marketing/PR company for Inkspot. I soon found out that they didn't really understand what Inkspot or online communities were really all about, so decided to drop them.

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Today's Blatherpics:

Thanks to Rand for these photos.

	Me helping out on "Saxophone in Spring" during Andrea's and Graham's concert at OVFF.
	The bottom three photos are of the three members of The Fibs, who attended OVFF this year. This fellow is Tom Fenton.
	Jim Iarocci.
	Carl Thiel.