Introductions and Summaries

Benjamin Kozlowski

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Hello! I'm Ben Kozlowski and I'm Signum's newest pesky volunteer creative-writer person. Rather than do something civilized like teach a class, I'm going to spend the month of November writing a novel for NaNoWriMo, and I welcome you to join me. Even if novels aren't your thing, I'm aiming to build a forum for creative writers to chat, offer each other advice, and commiserate over the woes (and joys!) of taking on ambitious creative writing projects. If that sounds even remotely interesting to you, feel free to introduce yourself and drop your elevator-pitch for your most recent literary undertaking. Mine is as follows:

I'll be working this month on Werewolf: A Novel (working title), a part-horror, part-procedural detective novel located somewhere between Stoker's Dracula and Chandler's The Long Goodbye. It aspires to sensitively investigate and understand the nature of violence in contemporary America, both in its newspaper-headline-realism and as a device to drive television plots and attract moviegoers. In the process, I hope to challenge some of our assumptions about violence, and, with luck, tell a decent story as I do so.
 
I've won NNWM twice in the past (on the same novel!), and it is a powerful ego boost. As the more regular members of the script writing team will attest, my personal life is kind of a-shambles, so I'm not going to try and tack on another 50,000 this November, but I'm happy to be a cheerleader and help anybody work through some tough spots as they come up. Good luck, everybody!
 
Hey - I'm GazeboGal on NaNoWriMo - befriend me there and watch the progress of The Bear's Son (or I might chicken out and do more of Shaman and Werewolf Walk Into A Bar)
 
I've won NNWM twice in the past (on the same novel!), and it is a powerful ego boost. As the more regular members of the script writing team will attest, my personal life is kind of a-shambles, so I'm not going to try and tack on another 50,000 this November, but I'm happy to be a cheerleader and help anybody work through some tough spots as they come up. Good luck, everybody!

Oh, good. I feel much better about working on something I've already started... This is my first time on NaNo, and it seemed they were stressing the "start from scratch" approach.
 
People use it as they need it - with the original vision being start to finish in 30 days. But if you really need to work on your thesis, or Book II's horrible middle part or whatever, just use the awesome NaNo energy!
 
Oh, good. I feel much better about working on something I've already started... This is my first time on NaNo, and it seemed they were stressing the "start from scratch" approach.
The goal of NaNo is to get people to write more. If you are bringing an unfinished piece close to fruition, that is just as good as starting from scratch. The only requirement, really, is that you actually put 50,000 new words on the page.
 
That, I can handle. I just didn't want to jump out of my current project and start something brand new - as it is I did a mess of research last night, and now know more than I ever expected to about the way the Ohio police force is structured.
 
It's so wonderful to discover other NaNo writers in this community! This will be my sixth NaNo but in many ways it definitely reminds me of my first, schedule-wise. Welcome to the NaNo-verse, Benjamin! I love the idea of a forum for writers. Right now I'm working on a sci-fi novel for NaNo, among a few other projects that are mostly medieval/fantasy. I'm primarily a pantser, so a proper synopsis is pending.;) In this latest endeavour I know there will be time travel, agency politics, and a character by the name of Jacqueline Bonaparte.

You weren't wrong about them emphasizing a "start from scratch" goal for the November NaNo, but as ouzaru says the real goal is getting your words out onto the page. There are also camp NaNos in April and July for spending extra time on your drafts; you can set your own word count goal for those, be it as slight as 10,000 or a hefty 100,000 words if you're feeling ambitious. :) But November is particularly exciting. I'd encourage you to attend Evening of Scribbling Recklessly, if you like write-ins. Great environment, loads of fun.
 
Hi Ben and all, I am going to try again this year with my story about middle school, quixotic mishaps, and music appreciation. I got almost to 5000 words last November. So far I have like 2000 more :)
 
It's go time kids, good luck.

I went to like, mebbe 3 write-in meeting thingies the first year. I kind of hated them. I had assumed they were sort of... well, roundtable, I guess, a chance to bounce ideas off of or work through some trouble spots with other people, but instead it was mostly a bunch of people writing next to each other and occasionally having word-count races. I have a hard enough time focusing as it is, putting me in what feels like a social environment and then telling me "okay now... don't talk to anybody!" is a situation tailor made to drive me nuts, so I stopped going and found it was way more helpful for my process. I'm curious to hear other people's' experiences with write-ins, though. Anyone who found it really helped? It seemed more to me like a way to effectively schedule (mostly)uninterrupted writing time.
 
I think it depends on which locations you go to. In my experience, some write-ins are as you described but others more roundtable and quite sociable. I will say EoSR leans more toward the former, with a lot of...well...scribbling recklessly. :) But there is no strict layout and members are free to write or socialize around snack tables and help each other in their own clusters if they want. It's kind of a 'pick what works for you, do what you want to do', from the one I attended. I know it helped me hash out a few ideas I'd been struggling with and get a bit of writing done as well. But that's just my experience.
 
That's kind of good to know, I guess my local chapter just didn't have what I was looking for. Which, y'know, not really anybody's job to provide that, especially not hard working, unpaid volunteers.
 
:)
Write-ins turn out not to be my thing - what I *want* is to write quietly, and while it's nice to nod at people and be in community sharing-the-NaNo-wise, I live pretty far from town, so the 30 mins of driving could have been spent writing...
 
I gave up *so* quickly. It just didn't happen for me this year. Week 2 often kills me and I had this big deadline at Work That Pays...
 
I gave up *so* quickly. It just didn't happen for me this year. Week 2 often kills me and I had this big deadline at Work That Pays...

It happens. I hope you were able to make your deadline! This round has been rough for me, too. I've had to sprint my way through 99% of this story and have lost a good bit (if not the majority) of the direction I had at the beginning. I'm currently about 3,000 words behind but hoping to catch up sometime later today.
 
I almost gave up, too-- the words are too many! But then around day 20 I got to some of the good stuff in my story and started putting more time into it, and now I'm only 6,000 or so words away. It's unlikely that I can still win, but I don't really mind. Last year I only wrote about 6,000 words in the whole month! But those words from last year gave me the whole overall shape for my story... So yeah, the long and short of it is, any amount that you manage to write is valuable. You've got one more day! Try, try again! Something good might come out of it!
 
That, I can handle. I just didn't want to jump out of my current project and start something brand new - as it is I did a mess of research last night, and now know more than I ever expected to about the way the Ohio police force is structured.
How did things shake out in the end, Ben? Make it all the way to 50K?
 
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