NaNoWriMo

Time to write! This year, for the first time, I’ll be participating in NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. I’ll be trying to complete the first draft of Ring War, the third book in my Once Upon a Time in Central Oith series.

NaNoWri Mo is a creative writing project that takes place annually in November. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. NaNoWriMo started in July 1999 with 21 participants. By 2017, 306,230 writers participated. For a quick overview of NaNoWriMo, see the Wikipedia Article. If you are interested in participating, go to their website, NaNoWriMo.org.

My NaNoWriMo mission is to complete a first draft of Ring War, the third book in my Once Upon a Time in Central Oith series. The first book in the series, The Schnoz of the Rings, was published in 2015. For more information about The Schnoz see the Books Page. For anyone who doesn’t know, The Schnoz of the Rings is a parody of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I have been making slow progress on the second book, now titled New Ring Rising. I called the second book Froyo and the Rings of Men (or FATROM for short) in earlier posts. As new the title might suggest, a new ruling ring is forged and the bearer, Nostril, the great-grandson of the Great and Powerful Schnoz, threatens to seize control of the rings of the elves and men and conquer Central Oith. Things happen, some of them are humorous.

In the second book, New Ring Rising, I introduce two new characters: Fi (short for Fidelia), an elf and grand daughter of Glenda, the queen of the elves, and Aaron the Last, the thirty-seventh and last son of the pirate, Aaron the Black. Fi and Aaron begin the story as spies working for Lostlorriland and Gonner respectively. As the book begins, they are slaves to Balor, the high priest in the Temple of the Coming Dark. They overhear a distressing conversation and must escape the temple and make their way back to civilization to warn their countrymen of the coming danger.

In Ring War (no spoilers), the free powers of Central Oith must oppose a new threat from the fanatics of Grim (Grim is a country in the far south) who send their army to conquer Central Oith. Aaron, Fi, and the rest of the Central Oith gang must stop them.

If you do the math, 50,000 words in the month of November is 1667 words per day. In timed writing, I can manage about 500 words in a half hour if I don’t sweat the spelling and punctuation. So I’m in for at least two hours a day. I usually write in the early morning, starting about 4 am, so I could theoretically finish by 6 am. I’m sure reality will set in quickly.

I write with a program called Plume Creator. It is available for Windoze and Ubuntu ( a flavor of Linux). I use the Ubuntu version. Visit their webpage at plume-creator.eu. The thing I like about Plume-Creator is that each chapter (or scene, depending upon how you want to work) gets a tab and you can switch between them quickly. So if you want to see what you wrote about some secondary character in chapter six, click-click and you are there. It also has a timer and counts words by chapter and by document. It has few formatting options and even a low-distraction mode. It auto saves everything. I give it two thumbs up.

I have a Plume file set up with thirty “chapters”, in this case one for each day of the month. As I write, I can see each day’s word count and the total for the document. I plan to sort out the chapters later. As November progresses, I will post my progress. Wish me luck!