NaNoWriMo Prep: Day 1

NaNo-2020-Writer-Badge-1

NaNoWriMo would not be the same without the participant badge and every year, in case you hadn’t noticed, I do like to display said badge. So, here it is. I really like this year’s. I like the colours.

The other imagery that I like to do for NaNo is to create a book cover. NaNo gives you a feature for uploading a cover and I think it’s a nice thing to have anyway.

I still have 2 contenders for this year’s event, and The Beast Within already has a cover that I like. A lot. I’m still messing with a cover for The Fool, though.

It’s not actually a story based on the tarot, it’s just loosely connected. So I don’t want to make it look too tarot-like. BUT, I’ve had a go, and the 2 options are below (let me know if you have any thoughts), along with the Beast Within cover.

Today’s work has pretty much been prep for this year’s NaNo.  I’ve been finalising the story ideas for both stories and I’ve come up with log lines. And they’re both still neck-and-neck.

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I’ve used 2 books for guidance: Writing the Killer Mystery: Great Beginnings (today); and How to Plan, Outline and Write your Novel in 30 Days (for the next 5 days).

Ghostwriting

I spent a lot of time yesterday on the ghostwriting gig and I apparently wrote more than 2,200 words. However, because they haven’t yet made it into the compile document, Scrivener isn’t counting them.

This is fine because I was preparing the rest of the Scrivener binder, as this little bit of admin stops me cracking on immediately with the day’s instalment. 

Now, the binder prep is complete to the very end with each of the chapters outlined and colour-coded (pink for a female point of view, blue for a male point of view, orange for beats, and green for sections or Acts).

Each chapter has what’s supposed to happen in that chapter copied onto the document and I’ve copied and pasted the formatting over from each chapter so that I don’t have to mess with that every time.

As I complete each 2,000-word(ish) chapter, I’m checking the box to add this chapter to the compile document. Then I close today’s project targets, re-open them, and they’re re-set with today’s word-count.

I only added around 900 words to the actual compile document. This was the end of Chapter 10 as I left it on a “to be continued …” cliffhanger. The rest of the chapter begins “… Chapter 10 continued”. And I opened Chapter 11.

But then I copied the chapter formats into the rest of the file, including a 3-part bonus story. Each part of the bonus story needs to be around 1,000 words. But I won’t be doing that for another 4 weeks.

At the end of the template for Chapter 20, I added the “to be continued …” again, to remind me to cut off the next instalment at around the  20,000-word mark (for this instalment, 40,000-word mark all together). 

This is a lot of faffing and, as I say, it stops me from launching into the day’s word-count target. Hopefully, when I’m ready to start the job this afternoon, I can now just go straight into it without worrying about the structure of the document.

Word meter as at 9am today

Ghostwriting Gig #1

 

20,924/63,000 words. 33% done!

(Word meters from Language is a Virus.)