Hello my fellow Worldbuilders, today is November 1st and that means only one thing! NaNoWriMo has begun! It's time to take that story you've been rolling around in your head for the past few months, years, maybe decades, and get writing! Your goal? 50,000 words on page by December 1st. To hit that goal for NaNoWriMo it means you have to crank out 1,667 words per day. I believe that to be an achievable task. The words themselves should be do-able. But what I will find difficult is actually choosing to write instead of doing an easier and more pleasurable task such as gaming. I think that using these past two years on hive, blogging as much as I possibly can, I will be able to keep the momentum and motivation to go further.
Bonus; My computer mouse is not behaving well at the moment so I really can't game at the moment! Boo-yah! (Get it, Booyah, but also boo? Hahaha)
The core of the NaNoWriMo pillar is, of course, the 50,000 word goal. But that core is surrounded by multiple tools and resources to help you reach your goal. Along the top of the NaNoWriMo page you can see a Help Desk, just below that is a Community tab and Writer's Resources, and further into your page you can see a friends list (add me) a home region, news, and a spot for writing groups. Since this is my first NaNoWriMo I don't have much experience with any of the community tools, so I won't be discussing those. So let's take a look in the Writer's Resource tab!
The Writer's Resources tab is filled with stuff to help you start your project, with their NaNo Prep and Prep Talks pages. It is also full of stuff to do once you've finished NaNo, like editing your work and possibly looking into publishing it once it's completed. They also link to Camp NaNo, a spring and summer writing challenge where you participate with friends and strangers with more loosey-goosey writing goals. Maybe one week you have a page count goal, the next week you're trying to write for 60 minutes a day. I dove into the NaNo Prep section since it's only day one, and I noticed that I was supposed to look at this tab in September. Whoops! While perusing their list of different prep work I noticed a section labeled "Build a Strong World for Your Characters." Well hello relevant content!
The #Worldbuilding section of the NaNoWriMo Week 4 Prep features a nice "Assignment" to help you explore your settings. 116 pages of work, nothing harder than grade school level work. And it appears to build a good basis for what your world will feel like. It's more about mood and setting than worldbuilding itself. As you're whittling away at your big exercise NaNoWriMo leaves you with a discussion forum and some webcasts and videos to help you continue to build your world. Some of these really do look like worldbuilding helpers! Not that setting and mood aren't worldbuilding, but I find that arises more from the story told than the world itself. Sure, Game of Thrones is a gritty reality world, but that doesn't prevent there being stories of young bumbling farmer boys rising to glory and living their best life drinking mead and winning tourneys rather than fighting wars until they die.
[Edit] Upon reading the worldbuilding preps in this section I have to say that they are very light. My cousin, @oblivioncubed provides much better resources in his (now on hiatus) World Building Wednesday posts. The NaNoWriMo posts consist of some very basic worldbuilding tips and a handful of obvious prompts that you've probably already figured out just based on the fact that you have a story to tell. Hindsight what it is, I am unconcerned about missing this prep time. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
If you want some real worldbuilding tips, go here: @oblivioncubed/worldbuildingwednesdays-collection
I am looking forward to continuing on this N-Bies story that I've been thinking about for years. I know the concept of a mutated rabies virus creating zombies is old news, but I wanted to put my own take on it. I think that I can hammer out a ton of content for the book over a month and I am excited to see this project finally progress. You may have noticed that I have a shade over 3,000 words already done. This is the progress I have completed on the novel itself. There is doubly as much words in worldbuilding notes. Which is where I will try to focus my NaNo updates.
Have a good month, writers!
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