I've said it before but I'm doing NaNoWriMo despite my terrible track record with starting and never finishing with 50,000. Regardless I am happy with the work that I've done for NaNo in the past and I'm happy that I found the time to let myself be creative for however many words I did accomplish.
This year however I'm planning on taking NaNo down and claiming 2014 as my first year as a winner. I've been working on various things related to my "idea" for the last month. Yes, I said "idea" instead of "plot" because I didn't have a plot to begin with.
Not only have I been planning with characters and plot stuff but I've also designed some NaNoing tools I'll be using to make things easier on me than it was in the past and keep myself motivated to keep writing.
These tools are seriously nothing new than what a lot of others have been using to accomplish NaNo for so many years now. I'm talking about new notebooks, a prompt jar, special handmade calendars for word count tracking, character cards, and my favorite, spread sheets for all the things! Spread sheets in all honesty aren't going to be that useful once November 1 gets here because I'm not going to flip between tabs all that much. It was just a great way to get characters organized when I first started.
Speaking of characters I did something new with the planning of those this year. I actually planned the majority of them out, or at the very least most of them have names! It took me a few days but I compiled a pretty extensive list of names and paired first and last names together (cue my spreadsheets) and then as I thought about my plot I filled in some of the missing stuff about them. My NaNo this year has a lot of characters, major, supporting and minor and I knew that when I first started. In times past, though those NaNos were quite smaller in regards to characters I would still get hung up over characters and their names and personalities and
everything. Having so much planned on the characters' part is so great because I have a broad foundation to start and I can develop along the way!
My working title was "Paging Dr. Drama" but that changed within the last hour to "Living Thought, the Last Request" which sounds like it's apart of a series...but I like it much better than the first because it actually grasps at part of the overall theme.
Currently my synopsis is as follows:
For the attendings at Lynnhurst Memorial Teaching Hospital life is about to be thrown upside down. The chief of staff's brother just showed up out of the blue taking over the emergency room with no approval from anyone. Mrs. Bluff, a hospital donor and board trustee, has showed signs of liver failure and has made her hospital stay hell for everyone in a ten mile radius. The most daunting thing that the staff and students of Lynnhurst are facing is the closure of their prized teaching facility by their own hospital board. The only one they can count on one hundred percent is the unruly patient in liver failure in room 501, Mrs. Bluff and that option is getting even grimmer as the days pass...
Whew, lots of words! Thought I'd at least hit on some of this stuff now before NaNo starts so I can have something to look back on during the final planning stages before the month long event happens.
I'm going to try to update every Monday here with my word counts and maybe my favorite lines and/or scenes.
For all those doing NaNo, best of luck!
I'll be participating in NaNo stuff on Twitter, follow me here.
And of course, my profile at NaNo HQ.
