{"id":32,"date":"2004-10-30T17:37:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-30T17:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kogblog.salticid.com\/?p=32"},"modified":"2004-10-30T17:37:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-30T17:37:00","slug":"nanowrimo-ground-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/2004\/10\/nanowrimo-ground-rules\/","title":{"rendered":"NaNoWriMo ground rules"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>OK, I&#8217;m taking the plunge. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nanowrimo.org\">National Novel Writing Month<\/a> starts Monday! Jonathan believes I can do it&#8211;a necessary-but-not-sufficient test. I&#8217;ll talk about the novel itself another time, but here are the rules I&#8217;ve set up for myself:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No whining about being behind!<\/li>\n<li>No fiction reading, except to analyze structure\/scenes\/dialogue<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ll do my level best, but I won&#8217;t beat myself up if I fail. However many words I write is more than I would have without this crazy scheme.<\/li>\n<li>If I start waking up with a sore throat (my body&#8217;s sign of too much stress), I will take it easier.<\/li>\n<li>Minimize time on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nanowrimo.org\/modules\/newbb\/\">forums<\/a>, which are clearly a great way to fritter away time.<\/li>\n<li>Get up, stretch, do something else briefly every 15 minutes.<\/li>\n<li><b>NO WHINING!<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t make much progress on my book blog this week, nor did I get anywhere near my theoretic target of 10,500 words, but oh well. I CAN do this if I&#8217;m willing to make the sacrifices that it will require. We&#8217;ll see whether I in fact am!<\/p>\n<p>Reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rsingermanson.com\/html\/on_writing.html\">Randy Ingermanson&#8217;s<\/a> advice, and reviews of the books he recommended, made me realize how little I know what I&#8217;m doing! All I have to carry me through this is 35 years of voracious reading. I&#8217;ve written a couple of (pretty terrible) short stories, but that was almost 2 decades ago. I don&#8217;t even have an educated appreciation of narrative; I recognize what&#8217;s good and bad but I can&#8217;t say why. I can&#8217;t explain why I like deeply flawed writers like Dornford Yates, Robert Heinlein, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; I know there&#8217;s something about their stories that works despite the major things that don&#8217;t work, but I can&#8217;t put my finger on it. Ingermanson and his recommendations make me realize that I <b>could<\/b> learn to analyze those things if I wanted to. But it&#8217;s too late for NaNoWriMo, and if I don&#8217;t &#8220;win&#8221; (50,000 words or even close), it might not be worth learning (what am I saying? of course it would be, I love learning no matter what!)<\/p>\n<p>I had hoped to &#8220;catch up&#8221; (I should just ban that phrase from my life&#8230;) with various things like email &#038; household chores before NaNo started, but that&#8217;s unlikely to happen. So I&#8217;ll just do it the way I do everything else: control what variables I can &#038; then fly by the seat of my pants. Wish me luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OK, I&#8217;m taking the plunge. National Novel Writing Month starts Monday! Jonathan believes I can do it&#8211;a necessary-but-not-sufficient test. I&#8217;ll talk about the novel itself another time, but here are the rules I&#8217;ve set up for myself: No whining about being behind! No fiction reading, except to analyze structure\/scenes\/dialogue I&#8217;ll do my level best, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/kogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}