September 2007 Archives

Last night, I couldn't sleep. Okay, I've been an insomniac since age 7. Every night I can't sleep. But last night the realization that NaNo '07 is just around the corner hit.

Hard.

And then I couldn't sleep because I was lying awake terrified that I would not have anything to write come November 1. I tried and tried to think of a plot, but that was a dismal failure. As I knew it would be. Writing, for me, will not be forced.

So, tonight I am in the car, listening to music, driving over the Saginaw River (well, I was in the passenger seat, hubby was driving), and suddenly, I knew what I would be writing about in November.

Thank goodness!

So, I applied to be a Municipal Liaison, and I was just accepted! So, in addition to the NaNo craziness, I will have even more responsibilities.

I had an *awesome* ML when I lived in DC. She was tireless in planning events and getting media coverage--in the Washington Post, no less. I would like to honor her (she lost her fight with cancer a few months ago), and I hope that I can be half as good an ML as she was.

When I moved to Michigan, I realized that the region that I moved to isn't even an official NaNo region, despite the fact that there are a lot of colleges in the area and there were a lot of participants last year. Well, I couldn't be regionless! So, I applied to create a Tri-Cities of Michigan region and be the ML, and I just found out that my application was accepted.

So, um, *gulp*!

The blog is up and running for NaNo '07. Whoo hoo!

Thanks to HostRocket deleting my entire site on the last day of NaNo '06 before I had a chance to back-up the blog, all 2006 entries are missing. :( But 2003, 2004, and 2005 are all present and accounted for. In the weeks leading up to NaNo, this will evolve into a blog fit for the public to see.

Thanks to HostRocket, there are no 2006 posts saved for posterity.

To summarize my 2006 NaNo experience: I wrote fanfic, a traditional mystery called Trixie Belden and the Mystery at Turtle Cove, which was inspired by my May 2006 trip to the real Turtle Cove Environmental Research Station. It was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. The idea for the story occurred to me when I was on my trip, and I thought NaNo would be a good time to write it.

Writing the novel was painful, and I pretty much hated every word that I wrote. Basically, I think the problem was that the mystery, as I had planned it, probably was only worthy of 20-25K words. Stretching to 50K made it tedious and boring and required a lot of unnecessary background information.

I hit my 50K words, but for the first time ever, I did not finish the novel. On November 30, the night I had planned to come home and finish the novel (I was close), I came home to a vandalized and robbed house. Needless to say, after the last cop left at 2 a.m., finishing a novel I hated was no longer a priority, and the deadline had passed anyway. I woke up the next morning to find that my online "home" was gone, too. HostRocket had managed to delete everything but offered no backup.

I had decided halfway through the month that I was going to rewrite the novel. Which I still need to do.

And that's my NaNo 2006 in a nutshell.