Its NaNo Time

Yesterday was November 1st and the official start of NaNoWriMo. For those who don't know what NaNo is see this explanation or I can just summarize it for you - during the month of November you write a 50,000 word novel. Last year I participated and won, and I'm hoping to do the same this year.

Of course, its a very difficult thing, more difficult than some people realize. One of the main obstacles in writing a 50,000 word novel is procrastination. NaNo participants have honed their skills to make procrastination an art form. And of course there are the plot problems. They can outline all they want but sometimes a character will do something unexpected an throw them off completely. I'm only about 2,000 words into mine and I am already searching for ways to make myself like my main character. I have a skill for making my main characters unlikable - I did the same thing last year and by the time I was done I didn't even want to deal with those people any more.

But the thing is, I could talk about nano all day and not even write a word because I'm that good at procrastinating. Right at this moment I am typing this post and have a movie loaded on netflix that waiting for me to watch. So now I've decided that I can watch 5 minutes of the movie every 500 words I write. Sure, that'll slow me down in my daily goal (in order to reach 50,000 words in 30 days you need to write at least 1,667 words a day), but it will motivate me to think quicker in order to watch my movie. The next time I do the 'movie reward system' I will say that every 1000 words I can watch 5 minutes, so hopefully by the end of the week I'll have made it quite far in my novel.

*fingers crossed* Good luck fellow NaNo'ers! You can find me here.