Day 19: Plotting and Planning

NaNoWriMo Day 19 AlsoI’m ahead. Technically not ahead on my 3667 words per day requirement to reach 100,000, but I’m so ahead on writing this novel in the big-picture sense my head’s in the clouds and waiting for the rest of me to catch up. I blame Twitter.

Strangely enough, there are a lot of writers tweeting about writing there. I’m Evernoting an average of 20 articles a day on publishing, marketing, plotting, creating riveting characters, making your opening BLAMMO!, how to tag dialogue properly, and how to eat right (thanks Dr. Chuck).

Have I mentioned the contests? I’ve entered two so far – Heather Webb’s How To Pitch Like A Rock Star and the Dorothy Dryer’s We Do Write Three Two One Pitch Contest. For review, I have no pride and am very very accustomed to be told I’m quite shit (just try to hurt the feelings of an international field hockey umpire, I double-dog dare you), so they seemed to be win-win propositions.

Then, OMG, there’s Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars – in which I cannot participate because of the pesky requirement for a completed MS to be submitted by Dec. 2 (what, one day to edit my projected 120,000-word NaNoWriMo draft isn’t enough?). Furthermore, I’m learning is that this contest stuff happens all the time.

Writers, I will happily generalize, are super nice people, approachable, supportive and have healthy colons. Ok, I’m not sure about the last part but the rest is totally true. With the completely indirect but of COURSE they mean ME! encouragment of a variety of blog posts and tweets, today I’ve decided to spend plotting and planning.

Plotting how I’m going to attack the Word Count monster at 2 separate write-ins tomorrow and the 8-hour Marathon with the YYC Wrimotaurs on Saturday. (Climax of “The Only One”? Yeah. You and me have a date on Saturday. Prepare to be written.) Planning on how I’m going to spend December and the months beyond marketing, editing, revising, polishing, pitching, synopsizing, loglining, querying and submitting my novel.

I am so excited and I haven’t even had Diet Coke yet today.