Writing is Hard Work

Late last month I discovered the National Novel Writing Month. Being one of those wannabe writer types who had recently found a rewarding outlet through blogging, I thought 'how hard can it be?'. 1,667 words per day, that's shorter than some of my blog articles. Easy.

Being new to this 'NaNoWriMo' thing I went in blind but, after seeing the way the NaNoWriMo website is designed, soon came to realise that part of the fun was in having fellow would-be-novelists to share encouragement with and provide a little friendly competition and motivation. Through the legendary communication hub that is the Tweetfleet, I found other EVE players who were also intending to participate. After all it was, for me at least, CCP_Fallout who had planted the seed in that very Twitter group.

I added all the Tweetfleeters I could find to my little gang of writers and off we all set on November 1st to pen our masterpieces. I don't know if the others had a clearer idea of the undertaking at hand, but according to the little word-count progress bars that every participant has, some of them clearly had the good sense to put down their quills and walk away before the starting pistol fired. Surely, it can't be that much of a challenge if you've got a general story idea in your head.

Oh no, my friends. Oh. No.

How over-confident was I? Those who chose not to start have cleverly avoided a listless month of too much caffeine, word blindness and broken sleep patterns. Unless you've got kids, in which case it's probably business as usual.

Personally, I'm finding it quite challenging to keep up with the average word requirement. When I say 'challenging', I mean, I'm just not. Well, not quite. I made great progress today (day 8) and managed to make up my steadily rising deficit with nearly 5,000 words in one day. But I'm drained now.

@Jaggedrain, writing as ArcanaMortis, has apparently given up on her 10,000 currently written words of EVE fiction and has started again with a zombie story. It sounds like NaNoWriMo suicide, but she did fire off over 4000 words in the first day so maybe she can pull it off.

Keith Neilson/Mandrill has made a start with 1,819 words, his story, 'Ashes to Dust' has an intriguing premise that reads like Nikita/The Manchurian Candidate set in New Eden (although I've got images of LeeLoo from the Fifth Element too). Unfortunately work seems to have petered out with a projected finish date of June 2011. What with CCP being very quiet too, it makes me wonder if the volcano has erupted and wiped everybody out over in Iceland.

Garheade did 200 words of his 'Finding New Eden' story about the fall of the EVE-gate several days ago, but we've seen nothing more since. I suspect he's been distracted by his EVE Commune podcast project. Congratulations on the four episodes so far. I especially recommend listening to the second discussion topic in episode 1. But what about the fiction?!

I tip my hat to CCP_Fallout who has led the pack throughout, steadily maintaining a daily word output and meeting target. Fallout's story is non-EVE fiction, a Cold War thriller called 'Project Delta'. But given the current total of 14,396 words written, there's not much info to go on. Very secretive.

As for myself, I'm just shy of 13,000 words at the moment, but that was only after a marathon day today which has brought me within shouting distance of being back on target. If only I hadn't stopped to write this blog, I'd be on even more.

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