NaNoWriMo has begun! I (stupidly?) have decided to join this year, despite complaining approximately seventy-eight times a day that "I'm so tired and I have no time to do anything." Whelp, it's time to shut the hell up and put on my big girl panties, since I'm going to somehow manage to write 50,000 words in November. Challenge accepted.
I guess. I mean, maybe I'll finish? It could happen.
That's the spirit.
As discussed previously, one of my biggest issues, besides time, with NaNoWriMo is that I feel like a lot of subpar writing comes out of it, since people just rush to meet the word count. I have two ideas for large projects that I'm sincerely excited about and I don't want to screw them up like the last time I did NaNoWriMo (I ran with an idea that I thought was decent and just totally massacred it while trying to finish up; the result was a mess that I just want to forget about).
Enter: The Storymatic.
I decided that instead of a large novel, I'd write a short story a day. And because I lack the creativity to come up with thirty short story ideas, I started digging around online and found this little box of fun.
The Storymatic is a box of hundreds of cards (the box says that there are "six trillion stories in one little box") that can be used for writing or even as a game. There are many variation on how to utilize the contents, but I'm going for their more traditional, straightforward approach. Every day I will pull two gold cards, which list attributes of your main character, and then two copper cards, which are lead ins for your actual plot. These are the cards I drew yesterday, for day 1:
I sat down late last night and plugged away, making things up as I went, which is typically not how I write at all. It was fun, though, and challenging. Last night I didn't hate what I wrote (and there was no wine involved, so there's a chance that I may have been somewhat accurate), so we'll see when, and if, I go back to edit some day. I was two hundred or so words short of the necessary 1,666 (or whatever it is), so if I keep going I'll have to make it up eventually.
Tonight I plan to do the same thing, although in the two hours or so that I have to spare between Sawyer's bedtime and mine, I need to get in a quick run, grade some papers, say at least two coherent sentences to my husband, relax for a second, and shower. I have I mentioned this whole NaNoWriMo thing might be a bust?
I sat down late last night and plugged away, making things up as I went, which is typically not how I write at all. It was fun, though, and challenging. Last night I didn't hate what I wrote (and there was no wine involved, so there's a chance that I may have been somewhat accurate), so we'll see when, and if, I go back to edit some day. I was two hundred or so words short of the necessary 1,666 (or whatever it is), so if I keep going I'll have to make it up eventually.
Tonight I plan to do the same thing, although in the two hours or so that I have to spare between Sawyer's bedtime and mine, I need to get in a quick run, grade some papers, say at least two coherent sentences to my husband, relax for a second, and shower. I have I mentioned this whole NaNoWriMo thing might be a bust?
That's a really cool idea, the Storymatic. Good luck!!
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