Do You NaNo?

Today is one day after release day, and I hit #2 on the Carina most popular chart! Woo hoo!

I'll be featured by Carina Press this afternoon, with a post on their blog and some stuff on Twitter and Facebook.

I'm also participating this month in The Romance Reviews YES! Party (Year End Splash party). My Q&A days are Nov. 4 and 23, but there are a ton of authors participating, with bigger tons of prizes available.

So who's doing NaNoWriMo this year?

In 2006, I did my first NaNo with Under the Moon. That book got me an agent and lots of good responses from publishers, but we were submitting a genre-fence-riding book when the bottom fell out of the market, so I didn't find a publisher for it until Entangled, who was willing to offer a contract and then get me off the fence. (It's now planted on the "romance" side, though still leaning on the "urban fantasy" fence. :) )

I participated in and won NaNo for the next five years. One year, both my kids did it with me. After Number Two decided she didn't like writing after all, it was just Number Two, who ALWAYS finished before me, the stinker. I think she's doing it this year, but I'm not.

It makes me sad, in a way. Five years with a certain atmosphere in my house, an excited urgency driving us. There's a fantastic camaraderie with other NaNo participants, and always people whose word counts challenge me (and, occasionally, vice versa!). I'll really miss it!

But I'm not complaining about why I'm missing it. Promotion for two book releases, a double deadline with two publishers...triple if you count book 3 of Goddesses Rising, which isn't due for a few months but I'm working on it every day. I didn't wait until today to start it, or I'd be doing THAT for NaNo. :)

So how many of you are participating? Have you done it before? What's your record? Let us cheer you on!

Another Successful NaNoWriMo in the Books

I haven’t updated my graphic yet—it’s on my other computer, so maybe I’ll remember tomorrow—but it’s December 1 so I have to comment on the experience.  Don’t worry, I’ll be brief. :)

I was aiming to finish the book, but got derailed by my solo trip to Massachusetts.  Kind of impossible to write when you’re driving in hurricane-spawned rain.  Or even when you’re driving under clear skies, actually. So I revised back to the 50,000 of the official NaNoWriMo goal.  Four years of participation, four wins, though they keep getting smaller and smaller.  The first two years were 89k months!  Can’t seem to get even close to that anymore.

My kids both did NaNo, too.  All three of us finished, validated, and won on Sunday, a day early.  Number One did 35,000 words on a very ambitious thriller she’s writing for an independent project at school.  I’m glad she has the project to keep her going, because she’s only added 10,000 words to last year’s NaNo book since then. :)  Number Two has decided she doesn’t really care for writing so much, but still had to do NaNo.  She met her goal of 10,000 words with a real-life-inspired journal format, and when she fell behind, she wrote play-by-play of the football games.  Shh.  Don’t tell anyone I told you that. :)

For us, NaNo isn’t only about the writing.  I’m thrilled to share the experience (though less thrilled to share my Alphasmart Neo) with both kids—the agony of writer’s block, the energy of brainstorming, the joy of creation.  But even more, I love how they’re learning stuff without realizing it.  Stuff about setting and meeting goals.  Breaking important projects up into small bites.  Working with other people, even on something solitary.  Relatively few people will have this experience with their kids.

And I think that’s very cool.

Blogging is the Last Thing I Should Be Doing

But come on! It's been...I don't even want to look to see how long it's been since I blogged. I'll spare you the apologies and excuses we all give when we go too long between posts. I know that's tedious, and honestly, you probably don't care.

So.

What SHOULD I be doing instead of blogging?

1. Revising Full Fusion, my NaNoWriMo book, to fix the scene set at Gillette Stadium, where I stopped Saturday to do a little scene-setting research, and to fix the parts that are stupid, because her friends would really not accept the truth so easily, and stuff like that.

2. Continuing writing Full Fusion, adhering to NaNo rules (i.e. no editing), because after driving 839 miles in two days, I'm 7500 words behind my goal.

3. Laying out in a spreadsheet all therapy charges, insurance allowances, insurance payments, and our payments, because I think the PT office is screwing me (unintentionally, it's just super-complicated and this is not a very well organized bill).

4. Researching and ordering Number One's contacts.

5. Updating my website (soooooooooo far behind on that!).

So there, that's my goals for the week. Wish me luck!

Something's Wrong With Me

I have a pretty competitive nature. I first understood it in high school, though I can recognize that it goes back further. All the way to first grade, at least. My mother probably shouldn't have told me what Mrs. Nadeau said in my parent/teacher conference. But even way back then, I was driven to be the best, have the best grades. No one else had to know about it--only I had to know.

Then in high school, I had a friend junior year who had comparable grades to me and did a lot of the same extracurriculars. We were neck-and-neck for a while with the fundraiser, but she has a much bigger family, so she beat me. She also had an infant son. I didn't realize I was competing until my boyfriend complained that I had no time for him, and did I really need to be on the prom committee? I dropped off it, not because he wanted me to, but because his whining made me realize that no, I did not want to be on the prom committee, I joined it because she did!

Nowadays, my competitive streak mostly manifests in word counts. On our annual retreat, we sometimes do word wars. Except it's really just timed writing, and it's only me that has to write more in 10 minutes than anyone else. Again, it's not because I have to beat them; I just have to write more.

And so it goes with NaNo. Usually, if I see that one of my buddies has written a little more than I have, it spurs me to push through until I top them. I love being the person in the group who has the most words. I don't care if no one notices--in fact, if they lament that they can't keep up, I feel horrible!

But this year, after two days, half my Writing Buddies have a thousand or more words than I do. One even has three times as many! And I don't care!

What's wrong with me?

Being competitive can be a big negative, I know. But it can also be a very important tool for a writer. It can keep you going when you have the don'wannas. It helps build your writing muscles, giving you endurance and flexibility as well as productivity. And mine seems to have disappeared!

I wonder where it went.

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ETA: The above was written Tuesday morning, but I forgot to upload and post it. The first three days of NaNo, I was writing late, handicapping myself with brain fry, and everyone was way ahead of me. Today I started writing early, and wrote a lot! I'm going to have to make that a habit again...