Well, it’s on. Good luck to all of you.
Um, my computer showed 12:01 a.m. when I made that post. Don’t read it for another nine minutes.
It is, indeed, on.
1500 words down and many many many more to go, but I’m awfully cheerful about it.
I’ve been looking for a NaNoWriMo thread on the Dope all month and never thought to look in Cafe Society. :smack:
I’m very impressed with how well this is going so far; I hope that I am not delusional. I’ve been at it for about three hours. I was aiming for 500 words per hour. After spending just over 3 hours on it so far today, including a lunch break, I’m at 4,580 words. I was kind of calculating writing speed based on how quickly I wrote essays for college. Oops.
One thing that is really helping me, and I didn’t anticipate it, is that my novel is very much character-based instead of plot-based. I hope that doesn’t violate the spirit of NaNo, but I don’t think I could wrap my head around a single plot for a month. The variety of situations in the novel makes it much easier to write.
Glad to see you’re quite cheerful about it, Drastic. Anyone else finding it going very well so far?
Though I’m distraught over Interrobang!?'s unavailability (Though it wouldn’t really have worked out - the man has a question mark in his name, for pity’s sake! Who does that?), I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about the NaNo. I’ve even got a word written! No… wait… Make that two! This is a piece of cake!
Neat, it took slightly under 2 hours to alternate between writing the first 2,225 words of my novel and tending to an under-the-weather ferret. If only this pace is sustainable!
Hmmm…I’m in, but with only a username and book title. I think it is a harbinger of incompletion that when I searched my title at amazon.com a veritable ton of books on Attention Deficit Disorder popped up.
Fear not, Tortuga! For inspiration may strike in the most unknown places and bring you to your computer to pen many words in a single day.
Right now, the characters are developing very well. I want to just draft more and more forever. Distraction is so very sweet also – it’s like the sweeetness of sugar after having none for thousands of words. 
I am so glad I stumbled on this!
I have had a writing itch for a long time, occasionally lightly scratched by long letters and emails and journal entries. I wanted to take a course, but my odd work schedule simply doesn’t accomodate the classroom schedules offered (if you start work at 4:00 and have a 10 hour day, all the classes are either too early or too late). I bought some software, but I didn’t get off my dead ass and really use it, other that creating my characters and a basic story goal. But this did it! I went to the site, signed up and already have 4219 words committed to paper!
So thank you, Francesca and NaNoWriMo - I’m really gonna be a writer! Woo-hoo!
I am so glad I stumbled on this!
I have had a writing itch for a long time, occasionally lightly scratched by long letters and emails and journal entries. I wanted to take a course, but my odd work schedule simply doesn’t accomodate the classroom schedules offered (if you start work at 4:00 and have a 10 hour day, all the classes are either too early or too late). I bought some software, but I didn’t get off my dead ass and really use it, other that creating my characters and a basic story goal. But this did it! I went to the site, signed up and already have 4219 words committed to paper!
So thank you, Francesca and NaNoWriMo - I’m really gonna be a writer! Woo-hoo!
Thought I’d give this a bump and see what progress, if any, my fellow NaNoDopers are making. For myself, I’m doing okay - I’m not quite where I’d like to be, but at least I’ve been writing. Hopefully, I’ll have a productive weekend and bump the wordcount up a bit.
Three days and a hair behind due to a business trip.
I’m at roughly 8000 words down, which is about 4000 behind where I “should” be, in a steady flat-rate quota per day sense. Ain’t too worried yet.
I’m at just under 9,000 words…and the first three days went so well, too. But now I have new ideas, so hopefully I’ll catch up to where I should be soon. So who else figured out that we should be writing 1666.66 words per day? 
At a more or less steady 2 plus K a day, I’m at around 15K. Yay me! According to the cool spreadsheet that’s circulationg, I’m “on track to complete on time.”
As most ideas do, I had one strike me late Wednesday night / early Thursday morning and hauled my ass out of my warm bed to sit in front of the computer and type. I wasn’t considering NaNoWriMo when I got up, I just wanted to get the idea in print so I wouldn’t forget it. However, I went ahead and signed up for NaNoWriMo around 1:00 a.m. on Thursday morning. Needless to say, I’m VERY behind. I managed to get nearly 5,000 words and I’m sitting at the computer now with the premise of working on it. But I’m here instead.
I hope to finish, just to be able to say I did it.
Where could I get this spreadsheet?
You don’t need one. If you’re good at math do it in your head, or if you’re poor at math use a calculator like I did. Divide 50,000 by 30. You get 1666.66, so round up to 1667. Make a nice list of 1-30 and you then list increments of 1667 until you reach day 30 at 50,000 (or slightly over if you rounded up), and that tells you were you “ought” to be each day. You could also make a list beside the daily goals to see how you’re doing, too. 'course you could be 1200 words behind like I am, but…
The fact that there is a spreadsheet makes me feel much less anal now. There are bigger geeks than me! There are bigger geeks than me! 
No, I’m not 1200 words behind. I didn’t sign up or start NaNoWriMo until the wee hours of Thursday morning. I’m more like 6300 words behind. :eek:
It’s true you don’t need the spreadsheet, but it’s definitely a cool toy. Here’s the link:
http://mockerybird.com/nanowrimo-report-card.xls
It’s got graphs, which aren’t neccesary but are fun to contemplate, especially as you get further along.