Hi all, slim pickings here tonight as I am going to write, write, write tonight and haven’t spent much time on this diary. Sorry, you get what you pay for. Hopefully your NaNo progress doesn’t resemble riding a bomb! Or maybe it should, as long as you don’t explode at the end of November.
My small writing group (me plus 2 others) has been plagued by the writing doldrums this fall, so recently, because our output has been dismal, we’ve been doing small write-ins together over Zoom instead of doing chapter reads. (We’re a multi-time zone distributed crew.) It’s helping us jump start the creative juices again. Since it’s NaNoWriMo, I figured we should do our own little write-whatever write-in. How is that different from what we usually do Thursday nights? It’s not, really, but for myself recently, I find there’s a profitable psychology to using a ‘writing timer’, particularly if I can convince myself I’m not doing it by myself.
For your perusal, here are three different writing timers. When you start a timer, you’re going to do your best to turn off that internal editor and just get some words down. We are all writing with you! Don’t worry about the space-time continuum issues; it’ll be our own little shared pocket universe. For those who aren’t working on larger NaNo projects, I’ll throw some challenges down below.
Productivity timers:
10 minute beach scene with wave sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mNhLMYPxhw
20 minute no sound (piano at end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_sztbMZImk
30 minute, cute penguins, no sound (chimes at end): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P98EpU0UjbI
Ambient sounds:
www.storyblocks.com/… (but to download you have to make an account)
www.ambient-mixer.com (this one looks promising)
NaNoWriMo updates! (lemme know in the comments)
Updated 11/19/21 — if you didn’t post on Thursday and want an update added, please send me a kosmail, and I’ll be happy to add it.
Aashir’s nani: just keep writing
BigIrish310: 50,000 words. On track so far.
bonetti: 50,000 words, rehoming and rebuilding a previous story — approx 5k words as of 11/18.
David Pax: more work on prequel to Without Gravity - outlined key event scene.
dconrad: 50,000 words - 55,097 words as of 11/18 and steaming onwards!
elenacarlena: 50,000 words, at 2000 words per writing session - 12,000 wds + research as of 11/18.
mettle fatigue: revise & post to OFPMFP an already-drafted short story— fair progress after switching which story as off 11/18.
NoBlinkers: 50,000 words on novel Amidst the Dry Dust - 32,656 words as of 11/18.
not a lamb: 10,000 words — 2454 as of 11/18
reppa: write something or things, get an idea for January — maps and sketches of story locations as of Nov 4, prog. 3500 as of 11/18.
strawbale: finish section one, at least, of alien novella - 3000 as of 11/18.
Toro Blanco: trying to finish my Charlie Turner novel - 4322 words
Y’all wild, ambitious, dedicated people keep keeping on, mkay? We are 60 percent through November, so an on-track word-count will be 30k words by midnight tonight. If you’re not there yet, I bet you can push for a few 2k word days, especially with the handy-dandy use of a free, internet-provided, handsome productivity timer. Results not guaranteed. /creepysalespush
For those of us who are just fooling around (aka, not setting our keyboards on fire with rapid-fire typing), here are some silly challenge ideas. Use all three timers to ramp up to a full hour of writing goodness or three 10 minute timers, or none as you like. Same with the challenges — if you make the end of the timer a hard stop — can you complete a small scene before the bell? Or will you use all three timers to develop the same challenge idea into a longer piece. Tis up to you:
Choose your own mini-write-in adventure.
Random-ish challenge ideas
1. Argument clinic: include a teapot and some Tanqueray, or two other nouns of the same first letter as you like. See option 3 below.
2. Setting as character/crisis point/there must be a better writerly term for this: I must be very morbid tonight, as I’m thinking of people being shoved off cliffs (topography) or being frozen in a snow storm (weather actually), and then there’s poor Vancouver right now with all its major highways washed out (topography + weather).
3. Learn some new words (like machairodont and somnipathy) with the Random word generator. Put ‘em to use. I highly recommend the ‘Extended’ word option with ‘greater than’ 3 syllables.
Share none, all, or just your favorite creation in the comments below.
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