Tag: NaNoWriMo

Winning NaNoWriMo!

Published on by Heart Full Of Books1 Comment

Although it’s the first day of Blogmas, and we’ll be getting Christmas-y tomorrow, don’t you worry, the start of December also means the end of NaNoWriMo. In thirty days, writers are challenged to get 50,000 words down of their book. That’s 1667 words a day. Bee and I definitely had it easier than most, halving the word count between us, but we thought writing 800 words a day was going to be a stretch after not writing consistently since July.

We’re so proud to say that with a lot of hard work and motivational hurdles, WE WROTE 50K! WE WON!! Throughout NaNo, we kept a chart of our word counts and we thought we’d run through some stats, because who doesn’t love some numbers?

Screen Shot 2017-11-29 at 10.17.15Highest Daily Word Count: 5,000 words (27th)
Lowest Daily Word Count: 300 words (6th)

Most Consecutive Writing Days: 7
Average Consecutive Days: 3
Total of Days Off Writing: 7

Weekly Writing Stats
1: 12.7K | 2: 11.7K | 3: 10K | 4: 13.3K | 5: 2.5K

Looking at the numbers, it’s really interesting to see which days were the hardest and when we thrived the most. Week 3 was definitely a kicker, but the sprint to the finish line made it entirely worth it! We’re so happy that we took part this year and finally prioritised writing after months of saying it was what we wanted to focus on. We wouldn’t have finished our first draft (sitting at 64K) without NaNoWriMo, and now we get the even more exciting task of editing…yay(?)

Congratulations to anyone else that won NaNo, and well done to anyone that took part because however many words you wrote, you’re that much closer to finishing a book!

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NaNoWriMo: Mid Month Check In!

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We’re just over the halfway point in NaNoWriMo, and today we should be at 30,000 words. That’s an insane number, and around where Bee and I both pulled out in 2015 (mostly because we hadn’t planned our novels further than that and just wanted to play Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer.)

This year, things are different.

We’re not quite at 30,000, but we’re chugging along after a couple days of not writing in favour of planning out a few more chapters (and watching the One Direction: This is Us documentary…it was research, we swear!) Our WIP overall is sitting at around 40,000 words so we’re getting into the tricky territory of The Middle, where ideas and motivation go to die.

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To keep ourselves motivated, we created a MyWriteClub account to track our goals, and because an online version wasn’t enough in the form of the NaNo graph, we made a sticker chart to keep ourselves accountable. Different colour stars have different word count weights and an emerald star is the highest tier at 2,000 words.

Our most successful day was the 3rd, when we somehow managed to churn out 4.5K, followed by the 11th when we wrote 4K. Seeing gaps in the chart for the days we didn’t write does make me feel tragically sad, so it’s definitely working as far as encouraging us to make writing a daily practice.

Seriously, stickers are motivating as heck. Why didn’t we remember this from when we were kids? It’s a tried and tested method to success.

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So, overall, NaNoWriMo is going even better than planned because I thought we would have given up by now. I guess it just proves to me how passionate we are about telling this story together. It’s what I’d rather do than anything else, apart from a 1,000 piece piece puzzle. (That’s what another one of those days off was for. Sorry, not sorry.)

If you’re doing NaNo, keep going! Even if you’re not at the word count for hitting 50K, you’re still writing more than you would have if we weren’t doing it!

Nanowrimo 2017 | Our Plans!

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I can’t believe it’s already the beginning of November and that time again! The time where a bunch of writers attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Is it possible? Well…

Bee and I attempted the challenge in 2015, (vlogging most of our struggle!) and managed to get 30k through each of our manuscripts before getting tired out and bogged down with university commitments. Unfortunately, that’s probably the way this year, too, but this time we’re joining forces and working on our joint project.

If we each manage to write 30,000 this month, then together that adds up to completing our manuscript (that sat at around 15,000 before November!) Hopefully by splitting the workload and writing as much as we can in the first week of the month, we’ll definitely be able to win NaNoWriMo this year.

So, what are we working on?

Here’s our Twitter pitch to give you an idea: Scott and Ronnie, teenage musicians, meet at a YouTube convention and sing a duet that breaks the Internet.

There’s so much more going on than that, including Own Voices asexual rep (and not just one character, but two! Yay!) but we hope you like the sound of that little teaser!

To any one participating in NaNo this year, good luck and we believe in you! And for any still unsure on whether they want to take part, we’d definitely recommend making the most of the wonderful community atmosphere to get that first draft that’s been swirling about in your head for ages finally done on the page!

(We’d also recommend checking out some of our favourite writing-based content creators, including: Kristen Martin, Lainey Kress, Natalia Leigh and the WordNerds!)

No Reading in November?

Published on by Heart Full Of Books2 Comments

It’s pretty obvious that our blog has been a little inactive this month. We’re two weeks into November and nothing bookish whatsoever has appeared! But, that’s all because of one thing: NaNoWriMo!

This month, Bee and I are both attempting to write 50,000 words of our current, individual YA projects. We’re almost on target for achieving the goal, and both have over 20,000 words down so far. It’s a big deal, and takes a lot of time that I’d usually spend reading out of my day, but it’s worth it.

We studying English Literature and Creative Writing at university. Writing essays and short pieces that fit our class briefs has become second nature to us, but it has meant we’ve sacrificed working on our own projects to do what’s demanded.

NaNoWriMo is so great because it gives you an excuse to make time for writing what you love, but in order to maintain our work schedules, we’ve had to sadly sacrifice reading as much as we’d like to in order to write.

And that’s not a bad thing. We’ll both have written whole novels by the time December rolls around! Speaking of which…

As per tradition, Bee and I will be participating in Blogmas. That means you can expect a post on Heart Full Of Books, every day for twenty five days, up until Christmas.We’re really excited to put time aside to give our blog some love, and anytime we’re not writing, reading for class or sleeping we plan to spend preparing to make this year’s Blogmas the best one yet!

If you’d like to check our progress on NaNoWriMo, check out our pages:
Maddie: here, and Bee: here!

If you want to see what we plan to read when NaNoWriMo is over and we can get back to the sweet world of books, check out our December TBR video!

Love, Maddie and Bee XOX