Nanowrimo Tips and Tricks

Final Day of NaNoWriMo

Today is the last day of the writer's attempt to pen a novel, and so I finally checked out the goodies that I have won as result of validating my novel. I did not enter this project with any of that in mind. I just wanted to prove that I could produce 50,000 words with an intent to become a part of a novel that I have wanted to write for some time. I had not done any preparation at all. In fact, I was not sure until the last minute which story I would develop, my novel on Alexander the Great or a story about suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge. I decided the latter to be too depressing so I opted for Alexander and am so happy I did. I learned more about Alexander through this effort than any other I have done so far. Many books are on my shelves, and some are fully read while others remain only partially read.

A good author wants to be read from page one to page last!

I truly appreciate the national novel writer's month program as I did make myself get into it and finish it. I even turned on to my interest in my novel of Alexander. I had to do a lot of what some will call padding and what I call notetaking, which is plainly tediously writing out materials that will be used in ways to frame or buttress the main theme of the book. My book is really interesting and informative as well as educational and entertaining. It has a long ways to go, and first I intend to finish what I have started in the first draft method and keep it up until I reach that last page.

I follow history closely but I also am using common sense,imagination, and fabrication, which is making it up as I go. That is what fiction is all about, but this book is adhering closely to the real history, with imagination and common sense developing the life of the story...some parts are experiences that I have had come to me as a result of my effort to learn of times past in "my" way and in which I believe totally. It is fun at this time!

Unbelievable Match

I had my novel validated today for word count, and my number is totally unreal! It is 53,538 words, and the reason it is so unreal is that it matches an important number of mine that made it something I can never forget. Absolutely unreal! However, my open office word count was a bit more than that, standing at 53, 946 words. So go figure!

I am so relieved, but my novel is first draft status only, not a finished product yet. It is salable, is interesting, and is in need of a lot of work, rewrites, re-editing, etc. One puts out the first draft for the purpose of building a frame, a foundation, and for having the novel essentially flexed out. I compare it to building a house and/or giving birth to a baby. I actually loved working on this except for the tedious places where I had to set up my construction or in metaphor terms build my walls. I have a plan in mind, but in order to do it, I had to do a lot of work in writing out all the groundwork. That was very long, tedious, and tiresome, but in the end,very important in developing the book and making my main points!

Plus, I had to reread several books, poems, and plays. There is a poem I want to use at some point but I did not get it onto this part of the book yet. It will come as I love it, and would use it in the frontispiece.

This novel is following upon my days at Kent State University when I discussed the power of religious beliefs upon our personalities, and it fascinates me this many years later, to see how time passes but in truth, many ideas remain the same despite daily ongoing growth and changes. It has really hit me at how much I have learned in the years since I moved from Colorado back to Arizona. All this is relevant as so many strange things have happened while I have lived in this part of the USA.

So being honest with myself, I do believe that this novel has helped me in many more ways than I would have suspected. I love the creative part of it, and I love my major theme which is obvious without too much discussion. It reenforces many beliefs that I had had as a teenager and adolescent, and I can see how far I have come since writing those thoughts for a philosophy class. Who would have ever believed that I would end up harkening back to the age of Alexander, and those gods and goddesses so important then! Go Greek!

PARIS - CHRISTMAS LIGHTS - 2010 - LUMIERES DE NOEL CHAMPS ELYSEES

Corinth Greece

Finalizing my book on Alexander

The way that Nanowrimo works is that you have to cut and paste and send your story to them to do a word count. At present, I have 53,600 words or so and will on saturday send it in to the officials to see what their formulator says that I have in terms of word counts. The number of words is not quite so important as the novel itself which in my case needs a lot of work and revisions. I have a lot of repetitions in it due to my trying to decide to use a narrative style or a first person journal style. As it is I am incorporating both. My book is basically trying to prove that the gods and goddesses who are prevalent in Homer's Iliad are also a part of Alexander's own life and travels. I will interject them in my books about Alexander as helping him just as Homer had done with Achilles. I am also proving that the stories, plays, and poetry of the period influenced Alexander so much as a child that he is under its influence all the rest of his life, especially his love and admiration for Achilles.

I did go back through a lot of it last night to try to clean it up and to make a few changes in the way of typos and spelling as well as a few faulty sentence structure problems.

I get tired of it a lot that way, but I found that this is one of the better stories about Alexander, least boring,and certainly closest to historical data and bios as I followed the history pretty nearly exactly. I take liberties of course where the historians cannot but I often find them to be utterly devoid of putting 2 and 2 together at times to realize what actually happened.I could figure it out. Why couldn't they? At least, my interpretation makes it a more interesting story but I still need to beef it up a lot.

I won't cite examples yet where I think biographers goofed but I did use my story to insert what I believe really happened.

My book is a bit more cohesive than most are. It will all make a lot of sense when and if someone wants to really come to know Alexander as I have come to know him.

Believe it or not, I find myself going back in time a lot as I get vivid pictures now and then. It is exciting for me that way too. Some would say active imagination...ha...don't they know better yet than to think that. So I checked it out. I could see Corinth so easily, and so I looked it up. Fascinating to me at how true my picture has proved to be. I love the place! Guess that means I will put a video of Corinth to follow this...if I find a good one, it will be posted.

Re: "NIBIRU ALERT" - REALTIME OUT MY FRONTDOOR - From Carneyart's Channel