Nanowrimo

NaNoWriMo Update: Rough First Day on the Road to 5000 Words

by ewmurks

Five thousand words in and everything has changed. This is not the story I planned to write, but it’s the story I’m writing right now. My original plan was to pick up where I left off on a previous NaNoWriMo from a few years ago, but I scrapped that idea mere hours before I was set to start. This left a vacuum ultimately filled by 1700 plus words of self-loathing prose, describing in incredible detail everything I had done wrong leading up to NaNoWriMo and that any words on the screen moving forward were not worth the pixels they were painted with.

But the next day I thankfully got over myself. There’d been an idea for a short story tumbling around in my head for months so I decided to re-visit it from a big picture point of view instead of just a few moments in time. As the wheels slowly turned in my brain it snowballed into something bigger and more complex, while maintaining a small, intimate story at its heart. I felt like I was on to something, and it gave me something to write about other than simply tearing myself apart.

So that’s what I wrote on day two, day three, and 300 words into day four. I really think I may be on to something. But the month is long, and there are many more words to write. In the end I hope there will be enough words to wipe out the first 1700 as if they had never been written.

Until the next update….

Throwback Thursday – Nanowrimo 2014

by ewmurks

Five years ago I participated in Nanowrimo which is short for National Novel Writing Month. Every November hundreds of thousands set out to write a novel of 50,000 words or more.  In 2009 I tried and gave up after just 8 days and almost 15,000 words. I didn’t know where to take the story, so I stopped. But now I have a pretty good idea how to proceed so will be participating in Nanowrimo again starting this weekend! Wish me luck! For today’s #throwbackthursday, I have a small sample from that original Nanowrimo effort back in 2009. Enjoy.

Conspiracy

She looked briefly at the empty seat next to her, her hands clenched tightly in her lap. Dr. Hooper had worked so hard to reach this moment, for the both of them, and now he was gone. She knew she would have to carry on for the both of them, it’s what he would have wanted. Their work was too important. She looked over at the faces of her team, some young, some old, but bright and eager, and she knew with their help that they would succeed.

Outside she could hear the steady drone of a helicopter approaching. But then the timber changed, the sound taking on staccato, irregular beat, like an overstressed heart. Everyone began to look each other nervously as the sound grew quickly louder, almost deafening.

The opaque glass canopy that served as the auditorium’s ceiling began to shudder.

The tail rotor crashed through the ceiling first, leaving behind a gaping hole and raining thick chunks of jagged glass down around them. Jessica dropped to her knees immediately covering her face. A few moments later the fuselage of Marine One came down and skated across the length of the ceiling, leaving behind a gash of twisted glass and metal. As the noise from the rotors began to fade a little, Jessica raised her head.

The explosion that followed caused what little glass that was left in the ceiling to come crashing down.

Jessica kept her head down… The last thing she wanted to do was to look up.