National Novel Writing Month 2008--Prep Time

Okay, so I'm trying my hand at NaNoWriMo again this year, even though last year I decided it was too hard to write a novel and be in college at the same time. This year, though, I think I might possibly have a chance. Why is that, you ask? Because this year I am not technically writing a real novel. I am retelling 30 fairy tales in 30 days.

Yes, you read that right. 30 fairy tale retellings in 30 days. Each fairy tale will be at least 1667 words long. That adds up to 50,000 words, which is how many I'll need to officially "finish" NaNoWriMo. I don't think this is cheating at NaNoWriMo. No one ever said I couldn't write 30 short stories in a month, right? And most of my stories have the potential to be connected. I mean, if nothing else there can only be so many fairies in this magical land (and I think they'll all take place in the same faraway country), right? Of course right.

I'm using the Scrivener software to help with planning and writing for NaNoWriMo this year. Scrivener is wonderful. I won't go into all the details here but basically it lets you keep all your stuff for a particular project--all your chapters, all your reference material and pictures and soundbytes and character profiles and junk--in one file. You can export the novel to Word or to a .pdf and have it all formatted to print off and send out for publishing. I really, really love it. It's so much easier than keeping everything in folders on my computer, so that I have to search through everything to find the picture I want for a character.

Anyways, I'm hoping that having this blog will keep me accountable for writing every day. I'll put up my planning stuff here too (which is mostly just summaries of each fairy tale and then the original versions; I'll probably only put up the summaries) so that in case of an emergency (God forbid) I'll have it all here too.

This is my first year writing on the computer for NaNoWriMo. Other years I've been writing longhand in composition books. It worked in high school because I could take a composition book to class but I couldn't take a computer. Now I'm in college I have a laptop and I can bring it to class. Not that I'll write in class. I definitely won't. But I go to every class early anyways so I can write before class.

I really hope I can finish this year. I will be so proud of myself if I finish this year. I've only finished one other year and that year the novel was complete and utter crap. Which is to be expected, I know, when you write a novel in 30 days, but it was disappointing. This year will hopefully be more managable because I just have to concentrate on one story a day and there's no continuity stuff. Later I can edit the stories and see if I can't find some common thread to weave through them.

Well, that's all for now. More tomorrow probably. I just wanted to get this set up today.