1) having a written outline is more effective than having one in your head.
2) minimum world building will prevent stalling later.
3) organizing write ins and forming a community (mine felt more like a scrappy, amorphous gang, but whatever) keeps you motivated and less likely to fall into a depressed rut.
4) having your family members not look at you like you've sprouted another ear when you tell them about NaNo is more help than one might think.
5) weekends and long car rides with an inverter outlet are key for catching up.
When all is said and done, I feel that I've taken one more step in my quest to write and actually finish a novel. An you know what? It feels damn good! (Pardon my language, as Miss Gratuity Tucci would say) The only downside is that I'm no where near done with my first draft. I'm actually about 3/4 of the way done with the story, so I need to keep writing without Ernestine's "help". (Ernestine, my lovely inner editor, was introduced in an earlier post) It's not going to be easy without a looming deadline over my head, but I have an opaque view of how I want everything to continue, so it shouldn't be too bad. Fingers crossed.
While I was so focused on reaching 50K words and "winning," I never stopped to think about the goodies on the other side of the NaNo-rainbow. Now that I'm standing here by the pot of gold, I have to say they look pretty sweet. I'm not sure when or if I will take advantage of the free proof, but I'm kind of excited over Scrivener. I didn't think much of it until I watched the tutorial video last night. It's pretty cool how it lets you divide your story up into sections, have sections side by side, and integrate outlining with writing. I'm going to give it a try when they release the windows version next year.
On that final note, I'm going back to my word document to pound out a few hundred words before bed. Hey, that's bound to be easier than the 1000 words sprints I was doing just this past Monday!
