Merry Christmas! Or at least, Merry Christmas season. I absolutely love Christmas and would wish people a merry Christmas year round if I could. Anyway, we're officially only a month away, so I'm now allowed to begin internally celebrating.
Okay, so I obviously didn't blog last night. I'll give a quick update. Things have been a little hectic on my end. I'll do my best to summarize everything before I've got to run off again.
Yesterday, Monday, my laptop finally came back. It had broken down and sending back to be repaired was a bit of a hassle and everything. Well, it arrived back at my house yesterday, which was great, but I had a lot of file updating to do. I also had to run some clean sweep programs because that hadn't been done since before it broke down last month and everything was being sluggish.
I spent the rest of yesterday doing some research for a handful of major scenes that I need to write before my novel can be finished. As I've mentioned, I've given myself a revision deadline, so I want to have all of the scenes written no later than the beginning of next month.
And there you have it. Now you know where all of that missing time went. I did absolutely no writing yesterday. 0 words written. That's unfortunate. But I did make some progress toward figuring out some important things in my novel; and I also got that laptop back, which is celebration worthy.
Tonight is game night with my family. We've got a bunch of board games and card games lined up to play, which is why I'm making extra effort to get my blog written tonight. I want to have this posted before I have to go. I plan on doing a little more writing when it's all over, too. But I'm glad that I get a night to just have quality time with my family. November's been a long month so far.
Speaking of the research that I've been doing, I have a recommendation that I'd like to share. If you've never heard of Scrivener, then I have to fill you in immediately.
Scrivener is an awesome program for writers that helps you to organize everything that you're doing. One of the things I love the most about it is its flexibility. You can create folders and subfolders within each project however you want them. You can label each text document by status (to-do, finished, first draft, etc) and by type of document (scene, idea, story notes); these can be changed to suit whatever you like to call each category and stage. You can even add keywords to scenes, such as "baseball" or "Jess POV" to help you sort them out later. You can check out their site here. There are special discounts available just for Wrimos, too.
Once you check it out, you'll see why I recommend it so highly. I bought it with a promo code after winning Nano, and it's one of the best tools I've ever used. It helps me increase my productivity because it naturally lends itself to the needs of each individual writer and project.
Finally, I'll tell you about my upcoming plans. There are a few NaNoWriMo-related things that I'll be doing that I'd like your help in.
First is the NaNoWriMo 2014 Revision Pledge that several other Wrimos and I have committed ourselves to. The idea is basically that we've set ourselves the deadline of January 31st to have completed our revisions. You can add yourself to my Twitter list if you're up for joining the challenge!
Second, I've been looking for Wrimos who are willing to do novel swaps with me. My draft will hopefully be ready in early December and I'd love to get the opportunity to Beta read for others while my own work is reviewed. I don't currently have my synopsis/excerpt up on the NaNoWriMo site (there was some weird technical problem early in the month) but I'll be posting it there soon. If you're interested in doing a swap, just message me! If this isn't for you, that's fine, but I'd be glad to have your participation in either or both of these efforts.
And...that's everything...I think. I've obviously been a busy blogger this evening. Maybe that'll make up for the blog-lack of last night? Maybe? I hope that this post has inspired some of you to join the revision pledge or to try Scrivener. I should probably wrap things up here because this post was longer than I'd expected it to be.
I'll hopefully get a bit more work done later on tonight. Maybe it'll go more smoothly because I've got my laptop back. Though I do have to admit that my "dinosaur" computer has been pretty decent this month.
Merry Christmas Season!
--Britni M
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