Anyone notice the little man off to the right on my blog??? He's my writing progress meter. I have been meaning to explain him for a while, and keep forgetting. This fall I took another Novel writing class. Actually it was a class designed to tie into NaNoWriMo for November.
What? Never heard of it? Think I'm speaking Ork? Actually it does sound like something Mork would have said (remember that show? Mork from Ork? The Mork and Mindy TV Show with Robin Williams? 1978-1982) To be honest, I hadn't heard of NaNoWriMo myself until my first day of class, and our teacher was explaining the plan for our lessons. But no... NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and that would be November, I guess every year.
So there's this organization that promotes writing during November each year, by challenging writers to write 50,000 words (approx 175-200 pages) in 30 days. So that was our class, we met each week one week prior to the beginning of Nov and one week after it was over to challenge, and encourage each other while writing for a month. And I loved it. I really enjoyed this class, our great teacher, Kathy Dunnehoff, she was perfect, and my fellow class mates, all great. I believe I will try this class again next year if it is offered.
So, enough of the story, how did I do you wonder? Not so great, I only made it to 20,019- you'll see that on my little cartoon next to my blog. I guess I was probably the biggest looser in our group. Eight of us started, two dropped out, five made the goal of 50k (okay one gal wrote over 90,000 but she is apparently some kind of robot... I'm totally on the fence if she is even human to be able to do that) and then there was me, the only non-dropout to not make it. But in so many ways I still got so much out of it. Moral support, encouragement, meeting other writers to stay connected with and, most importantly probably...it made me realize I need to keep blogging (and I'm sure you're all thankful for that right?...hehehe). The class kept me wanting to write. whether it's on my manuscript or just here shooting the breeze to who ever is reading, writing is writing.
I still plan to finish my novel, my total first draft goal is actually more words than the NaNoWriMo goal. I hope for about 80,000 words when I am done with the first draft, knowing that more words will probably be added in during the revision cycles. So I'll keep you posted with where I'm at on my little progress meter. So far I will say Dec has mostly been a flop for me. Way -Way- Way too busy, and then just plain mental when the busy stops. But my time is coming... like I said before... most of the chaos ends for me around the 19th, I think... then it's just me and my computer in all of my spare moments (fingers crossed).
Oh, and the little BeanMan. I can change his actions depending on what writing mood I'm in, so if you're paying attention he'll be doing different things periodically. And the pile of paper next to him grows as I add more words to my total.. HOW COOL IS THAT!
And to give you an idea of the significance of "Word Count," this blog entry actually has 626 words in it.... I had at one point started adding up words in all of my blog entries and I was over 12,000 too bad that doesn't count towards my total word counts...
CBD: It's quiet..I love it!...Not a creature is stirring... Not even a mouse (or that damn TV!!)
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