Saturday, November 20, 2010

NaNoWriMo Update

On Wednesday, I have a half day. I have three classes on Wednesdays, all in the afternoon: institute, French conversation, and French composition. I have the same teacher for the two French classes, and both he and my institute teacher decided to cancel class. So, all I have on Wednesday is work in the morning from 9-12, then I can go home, write write write, and eat some Chinese food for dinner. Why Chinese food? Well, I don't know how many of you remember this guy:

Takeru Kobayashi. One time on Food Network, I saw a show about him. It said that the night before a competition, he eats rice. The rice expands in his stomach overnight, making his stomach bigger for the competition. He then eats little things throughout the day to keep his stomach from shrinking before the big feast. I decided that I should approach Thanksgiving in a similar manner. So, about four or five years ago, after learning some of Kobayashi's tricks, I decided to start a tradition of eating Chinese food the night before dinner. I've got to make the most out of turkey day! 
Hope you all have a wonderful thanksgiving. I'll try to blog next week at some point with some things I am grateful for. You should all do that too! 
Thanks for reading! 

Saturday, November 6, 2010

8,825 words!

*Warning: This blog post is primarily related to my novel-writing progress and process. If you don't care about that stuff, feel free to ignore this blog. My feelings will only be slightly hurt*
I am going to make an effort to blog once in a while this November. It might be easier since I'm doing National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) because of how excited I am for everyone to know my progress!
By the way, there's a little box right over there --> with my current word count, it is linked to the nanowrimo website, so it will always be up-to-date. Just in case you want to occasionally check in and offer words of encouragement or anything. :-)
So, I started out the week knowing exactly where I wanted to go, who my main characters were, the setting, all that good stuff. As I was writing this week, I wrote a very small excerpt from another character's point of view. I then switched back to my primary main character. Well, as I was writing, I was realizing that I don't really like my main character all that much. I don't dislike him, I just don't really have a vested interest in him.
So I decided to try and write another excerpt from the other character's point of view (still need a name for her...). And I realized that I write a lot more quickly, and I enjoy it a lot more, when writing from her point of view. SO, I switched pretty much my whole story.
The plot is the same, but it will focus on my female character rather than on her incredibly boring brother.
Since coming to this decision yesterday, I've written about 3800 words. That's about 43% of what I've written so far. Yep, 43% in two days (not really though, because I decided this yesterday EVENING), compared to the rest in four days. Can you tell my writing speed has picked up? I love it!
Basically I just wanted to share my breakthrough with you, because I'm so excited about the new direction my novel is taking. I hope you guys don't get sick of hearing about my novel, because that's pretty much going to be my life for the next month.
In other news, I'm still alive. Justin is still alive. We're both still going to school, Justin is still looking for a job, I'm still loving being a writing tutor. Not much going on outside of my little made-up world.
Thanks for reading, and any encouragement about my novel is always appreciated! :-)