So It's Come To This: things we'd never thought we'd do

Hehehe. To appease my inner editor, I no longer delete the words I find atrocious and must replace. Instead in the middle of the sentence I'll have - He [walked/ strode] toward the door with a [flaunting/ blatant] swagger.

Two extra words toward the wordcount. XD

*Cough* I'm a bad person, I know. >>

Yeah, but it's just like he/she said without the ability to add exposition.

The mind can be a playground if you use it.

Planning progress: I know that it's set in a hotel.

Yeah, I've done that. That's not low. Low would be cell phone text messages in all their mistyped glory. However, that does not boost the ol' word count.

This has got to be cheating: including all or part of the lyrics of a song at the beginning of a chapter. And then translating it! Tee hee. But I'm writing about music so I get to!

I also have a whole chapter deconstructing a YouTube video.

Hey, I'm writing about music!

Silencio ranas, que va a cantar el sapo.

I never thought I'd base a character on Douglas MacArthur, and I never thought it'd be a talking stalk of wheat.

My main antagonist [an evil chrysanthemum] just killed a cat. That's quite low, not the lowest I've ever gone but really low.

The mind can be a playground if you use it.

Planning progress: I know that it's set in a hotel.

I promised myself that I wouldn't change my use of contractions in a feeble attempt to boost my word count, but lo and behold, I found myself backtracking and changing some of them as I'm hopelessly behind (I didn't do all of them, so I'm not COMPLETELY going back on it- at least, that's my excuse).

"There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person."
-Anais Nin

At least you're generally following the same storyline, right? I've become so frustrated with my "modern" story, so I made the characters be transported to a fantasy world, and when I get sick of the fantasy world, I'll make everyone suddenly show up in our world. The characters randomly spew off poetry, there are author dialogues scattered throughout the pages, and the characters sometimes expound upon how great low gas prices are as compared to when gas was over $4. Now THAT is sad.

How about having an older character talk about the time (back in the seventies) when he/she went to Alaska and was shocked at how expensive the gasoline was there. Yeah, it was FIFTY CENTS a gallon. The horror. (This was back when gas was about twenty-seven cents a gallon in California.) Should be good for several pages of 'back in the good ol' days' dialog.

In the past, I've been so desperate that I've done a search for "wordn't" and replaced it with "word not". (Can't to can not, don't to do not, etc.)

You don't have to be crazy to work here... We'll train you.

Writing down a very vivid dream I had... and pasting it into my novel. What?! It was 1386 words - and I might use it. Maybe. Anyway, I did write it, so I think I may as well count it.

'06 - Ketchup: 21,000 words. '07 - Toast: 35,500 words.

NaNo journal of craziness for '07 and '08: http://flavour-of-nano.livejournal.com

I pasted in a newspaper article I wrote for history. Yeah, it's only two hundred words or so, but I still didn't think I would go that far.

Okay, it's not completely unrelated to the story, considering one of my MC's is a reporter, but still...

Haha, I hate to be a debbie downer, but you could probably write far more than a single word in the time it takes to change a single contraction into two words!

2005-2007: FAILURE
2008: The Knights of Catlan

My fantasy characters have three or four names each - their first name, their religious designation (Dark/Pale etc) their magical affiliation (Line/Trace) and their surname.

That is definitely good for some extra wordage. I always introduce each new character in this world with their full names, and thereafter with their main three. The main characters just have their first names except when other people have to greet them, which I'm planning on happening a LOT.

Lots of introductions= added wordage.

-Hope

2001: Last Straw Summer
2002: The Hollow Ring (unfinished)
2003:The Caged Tree
2005:Mistralia
2006:Stormglass
2008: The Dark Line

I really dislike using dirty word tricks in application, but I love ideas. I however try to make it all part of the story, flowing, if that makes sense.

Well in my story it all comes back around, turns out that she has gone crazy and most of it is in her mind.

ANd i definitely took like the entire exposition in the book and put it at the end too *headdesk*

Not quite so bad, but for me, i felt very cheap, hahaha

The experience of survival is the key to the gravity of love.

i have to use a ton of dirty tricks to add words, and I also find myself putting in ridiculously long complaints over card games, mispronounciations, and really long similies/metaphors

One of my characters just quoted Rilke (easily 20 words) and he might do it again, this time with a whole poem!

This might be a bit off-topic (it's not *that* dirty, but, well, it's tricks)

Dreams, sure!

I just spend a couple of hundred words describing a dream of my MC,
which has no connection to the plot whatsoever. It was just a way
of "getting into it" at the start of tonight's writing session, and it worked.
Since I have almost no clue where the novel is going (it's been living its
own life more or less since the beginning), it might turn out that the
dream is of some importance at some point, but right now it's just
a quite useless description of a very boring dream.

And oh, I have also quoted songs a few times. Not big quotes, but it's
given me at least 30 words perhaps. Maybe 50 in total.

What else?
I have a quite strict no-delete policy this year, which means I'll delete
almost nothing, except if I write something that's totally useless and
only leading me into no-man's land. That's only happened a couple of times
luckily. So there's a lot of useless crap and silly sentences in my novel, but as long
as they keep me pushing forward, I keep them.

And oh, my baddest: I've been writing dialogue like this:
- Hey, he said.
- Hey, she said.

6 words, right? Nope, my archaic laptop with Microsoft Works 3.0 (!) thinks that's
8 words. You see '- ' is a word, in MS Works's brain. But I stopped writing like
that when I found out, so now I write the - without a space after, so it doesn't
count as a separate word. (btw, Word 2007 counts the same way, I just discovered)

Ah, it was good to vent :)

H a s   a n y o n e   g o t   t o   t h i s   s t a g e   y e t ?   I ' m   b e g i n n i n g   t o   t h i n k   i t ' s   t h e   o n l y   w a y   I ' l l   g e t   t o   5 0 k . . .   : (

I was hoping to get to 50k by the 15th but it's been looking bleaker for that. So a few days ago I included a mini-arguement about the best flavor of ice cream. Now, this doesn't seem so bad until you consider the fact that these are soliders in the middle of hostile territory that could be attacked any moment.

Title: Beyond the Veil
Genre: Sci-fi
Oz of Mountain Dew: 408
Progress: Excellent

Of all the things I've lost I miss my mind the most ~ Ozzy Osbourne

I'm also in no-delete mode (necessitated by my being about 10k words behind schedule). I frequently start a sentence, change my mind about how it's going to go, then just start it over in hte middle of the old sentence. Or I'll want to add a sentence to a paragraph, decide it's not needed, and move on, with half a sentence at the end of the last paragraph for no reason.

Also, my characters have gone on strike, which necessitated including a small part from one of my other projects while they sat in a corner and whined. And I have a character who's a thesaurus and periodically lists synonyms to random words.

2007 Nano- Sky in Glass- 40,490
2008 NaNo- The Awakening- 50,036 (yay!)

I'm thinking, because I'm not entirely sure that my story is going to even make it to 50,000 words, I'm going to somehow transport my characters to another time and place completely unrelated to the story, and they have to find their way home. I don't know though, I'll have to see how things are going ^_^.

Oh man... i just stole the instanst messaging idea and gave them each like five word names. Then i had one of the character's computer keep messing up and sending everything twice... i feel so... so... bad... but i got 1,151 words out of it

Yes! Ha, I love it.

If it makes anyone feel better I often feel compelled to remind the reader of my protagonist's middle and last names. Important info not to be overlooked!!

"We have no choice but to allow the literary imagination its promiscuities." (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

Fangy hates me for quoting Spivak!

Character development. Where did THAT come from? I'm writing about killing zombies, for dog's sake! My characters don't need to develop beyond "I like this kind of gun and this kind of melee weapon and also fire."

Need some inspiration? Try my generators: Chaotic Shiny

My character is walking around a shrine in Kyoto, so I decided to write about 900 words on the history of Kyoto as Japan's second capital and comment on how great it is that so many old buildings are still around, why they're around, what people think of having them around, who works in them since they're still there...and my MC is about to get attacked by unknown assailants and will have to run for her life in a bamboo forest - which I will describe in much detail, along with her emotions about being pursued, and how rapid her heart beat is etc etc etc. Yay! Bring on 15 000!

Edit: Totally stealing that drem idea by the way. Its perfect! One of my characters finished a scene by falling asleep!

Happiness is a journey, not a destination.

I put Adolf Hitler in my story just to add more words. Because he talks a lot. And he's interesting.

I mean, yeah, it is a story about World War II Germany. But still. Hitler was NOT supposed to make an appearance.

"Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood. "--Nietzsche

I'm giving two of my main characters Magic Convenient Amnesia (patent pending) right in the middle of the story so they can go off and start new lives...and a brand new shiny plot just when this one was starting to run out of steam...
I mean, the plot was ridiculous before, but this is a new low.

I've included a deleted scene, a timeline, and a table of contents.

Also my MC is just getting to know this one gentleman (whom she plans to make marry her). She doesn't know him that well yet, so even in narration he's referred to as Mr. Surname as often as I can, instead of just "he/him" or a first name, which is too informal for their level of acquaintance right now anyway. I feel very Jane Austen.

2000 words of a scene that starts like this:

“The author has writer’s block on anything that actually matters to the plot so she decided to write some porn,” Julian explained.

So much for this not being a trashy romance novel.

I included some dreams, the baking of an apple pie, the mc who randomly fell in love (because i didnt know anything else), the death of the mcs best friends mom or random conversations about orange post it notes.

*sigh*

everything to get 50k

soon my mc is going to learn tennis..

I've started having my characters say "you know," "I mean," "yeah," "well," and "okay" a lot. If you add one of these words/phrases every time someone talks, it adds a large amount of words to the word count. Pathetic, but it works!

i am writing about Color Guard, and this is my 8th season doing Guard. i feel like that is almost like cheating. i come home every day from practice and vent about people and things (all of which are in my story) and the words add up. My story is practically half non fiction, much easier to write about when you have as much experience in one thing like i do with Guard.

anyway, back to it!

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Formerly Trulyyou
2007 NaNoWriMo winner "Henri"
2008 Script Frenzy winner with Auora Lyren "It's Spin, Not Twirl"
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"Beloved rea