Reiqua's NaNo 2017

[Reiqua]

Well... I decided on 10th September that I was going to "do NaNo" this year, even although smashing out lots of writing has never hugely appealed to me (except when I have an assignment deadline :'D)... Reason for that resolution being that a writer friend of mine who is actually a published author needed some motivation to work on her next book and I told her we'd do NaNo together. Even though I had no idea what I might do for NaNo...

Last year I undertook to write 30 NaNo dares into the one story over the course of 30 days which... didn't exactly happen but I had fun!!

This year, I have ummed and ahhed and deliberated right up until the first of November and I think this morning I finally came to a decision - I'm going to try to write non-fiction.
The project I have in mind would be something of a... manual? handbook?... for running a children's program... I'm sorry, it's really hard to explain :/

So I shan't be following a word count per se... what I might aim for is possibly three pages per day? That would get me to about 100 pages over the course of the month which sounds about right... But flexible in terms of page-per-day count because word/page count is definitely not representative of the amount of research/prep that goes into producing each section of this document...

There will possibly be some narrative in there, fiction and nonfiction, and I may post some excerpts of that but... we'll see!

And now for the not-that-major task of deciding on a topic for my program and writing the first three pages by the end of today \o/

[Reiqua]

Well as the first of November draws to a close, I have three pieces of progress to document:

1/ I have chosen a topic for my program - it is the Psalms
This should be good because that way progress should be rather steady and free from major roadblocks as I work out how to convey the broader picture well and fit everything in with it...

2/ I have chosen a first Psalm (a non-trivial decision). It is Psalm number 23

3/ I have written the first seven* words of this part/chapter/section/week
The first seven words are always... well they're not necessarily the hardest, but they often are and they're the most pivotal. See, the first thing I do is to write a summary of the Psalm and the rest of my material for that Psalm will hang off that. And my summary always tries to be seven words or less.

And there you have it! Three bits of progress sounds better than seven words, so let's just roll with that...
And maybe if I set the font size really big, seven words might just take up three pages, you never know!



*in this case it's actually five words but seven sounded better

[Reiqua]

Well this is a rather 'meh' achievement... but I'm up to nine words now!! In addition to my five word summary I've added four topic headings - peace, safety, victory, and security.

Those four topic headings will hopefully define the structure of the three stories/studies that I will eventually write, and all the other activities will hopefully tie in with one of those four themes...

These past two days' work have been pretty mediocre - like I haven't put all that much time and effort in tbh, but I really do prefer having these skerrics of ongoing progress even if it's small steps which... depending how you look at it, one could argue that that's what NaNo's all about!

[Reiqua]

Well I didn't achieve anything yesterday so I didn't post anything yesterday...
But it's Saturday and I've actually managed to get myself off my lazy backside and write a thing! Specifically I've written the discussion in the form it would be used with little kids (ages 5-8). Discussions for medium kids (age 8-12) and bigger kids (age 12-16) are yet to come.
Furthermore I managed to find art online (and good quality art too!) which supports the story as I wrote it, so that's a really awesome bonus

My current word count is 1997 and my current page count is 12, which... I did say I'd aim for three pages per day, and twelve pages over four days sounds to be just about bang on track!