Saturday, August 31, 2013

3-day-novel contest - day 1

Well, I forced myself to stay up until midnight last night so that I could start my novel right at the start of the 3-day timeframe for this contest. Still had no idea what I was going to write about so right there, I've failed on one of their main recommendations, which is to have some sort of outline prepared at least. Despite that, I opened a document, set the formatting to the required double-spacing, 12 point font and typed my name, followed by chapter 1. And then proceeded to get into this whole flow of things and get a very promising start by finishing the first page really quickly. Having made my token start and with several ideas floating round my head, I decided to get to bed and get some sleep before having an early start this morning.

And since then, it's all gone. Things that seemed witty and interesting last night were just flat and dead this morning. It's now almost three in the afternoon of day 1 and I'm no further along than I was more than twelve hours ago.

So, anyone any suggestions for a makey-up word to describe a many-legged creature that stinks, can be knocked out by the smell of a rose and dissolved when liberally splashed with vinegar?

4 comments:

Kellie @ Delightfully Ludicrous said...

Wow that sounds like a fun/terrifying thing to sign up for! I've done NANOWRIMO a couple of times and I thought that was bad!

SarahN @ livetolist said...

Wow, I have NO ideas for you! Seriously, i couldn't write fiction, but I'm great with matter of fact sorts of stuff

Moonwaves said...

Well, I figured out at about four o'clock that even at my fairly fast typing speed I would still need something like 15 hours of non-stop typing to get even a short book length piece finished. I kept at it for another few hours though but have officially dropped out of the race. It has been a fantastic learning experience though. Will definitely try again next year.

Fiona said...

I love their by-line, "The world's most notorious literary marathon"!

As for the creature - I asked my Mr 9 because he loves fantastical creatures. He thought the name should be based on a version of a Kraken, but then he randomly decided it could be called a "Zarach"!