*NaNoWriMo or "Write a Novel in a Month"!* :)

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What region are you in? And - although I realise you might not want to open this particular can of worms - have you considered e-mailing your ML, or sending them NaNoMail about this?

Although, if most of the participants are younger, it may just be that they work on different schedules and have different issues as far as getting places.

Unfortunately, my ML is part of the problem, it seems. He admits he's not very good at this. I guess there wasn't anyone else who wanted to do it in this area. I'm not going to worry about it any further. There's a nice coffe shop here that's in a sort of central location that I go and hang out a couple times a week and I just let others in my region know I'm there if they want to stop by. No one has so far.

Most of the people in my region seem to be college students, so they have class schedules and commutes to contend with. I understand that. Where I live, older, single, educated people like me who'd be into something like this are not common. Most educated people here move away once they are out of college. I'd move too if I had the money!

21,008.

I wrote over 2,000 words a day the last three days, the story was flowing, but now I seem to have got bogged down again. Something about some character interaction is not gelling/feels "dull"/uninspiring/unreal or something, so have to work that out before can continue because it will determine what happens next.

Well done everyone else for sticking with it. The drop-out rate seems to be increasing judging by the Facebook page for my regional NaNo group and the main site-forums.

Good luck with further writing.

I haven't been able to attend any meet-ups because I am English but live in France and haven't joined a local group, not into speaking french about it! :lol
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Good luck sorting that problem out, ounion.

Because of how my story is structured and how I have a loose outline I've been going by, if I get bogged down at one point, I can just skip ahead to the next chapter. I've done that a couple of time already.

I'm about to hunker down here and start writing. It's early evening still here and I plan to be up til 3 or 4 in the morning, if I can go for that long. There's been a couple night-long sessions where I was literally falling asleep over my keyboard around 2 AM.

I am at 28,559 words right now, and will probably stop for the night, or at least quit very soon.

I hope the rest of you are doing well. For what it's worth, this is the first year I haven't been struggling to reach 10,000 at this point - and I've won three years already. So you can still do it.

I'm doing it, but not I'm not overly-serious about the deadline. Just writing a novel, really, and working harder on it this month. So far, I'm at 47 (8.5 x 11, single-spaced, indented) pages and 30, 000 words (a total accumulated over a several months). My goal is 100, 000 or more. I'm hoping to get it published when I'm done, too.

Out of curiosity, what genre is everyone doing? I'm doing cyberpunk, a personal favorite of mine.

I'm writing a very weird, subtle alternate history.

The only reason I bother to take the deadline seriously is because it helps to motivate me. Whatever works, I use.

Standard sci-fi with some surrealism throw in.

I have less than 6,000 words written and I already feel like doing a rewrite because I'm dissatisfied with the character development and plot progression. I quit NaNoWriMo.

There's no such thing as standard sci-fi, I've found. Like Star Wars or Star Trek, you mean?

Depending on what you mean by sci fi I guess.

Anyhow, it's a story about humans encountering extraterrestrial life. Theoretical exogeology, exobiology and exogenetics. That kind of sci fi.

I'm glad there's a NaNo thread here! I'm at a little over 23,000 words, but really struggling. I have a ton of characters and I feel like my overall premise is cool, but the story is going nowhere. I'm starting to feel bad about myself because I have this whole made-up world at my disposal, and I can't even figure out a decently interesting thing to happen. Arrrgh! I've never felt so unimaginative in my life. Anyone else in distress?

I'm having the same problem with a different project I'm working on; a fantasy (but not for NaNoWriMo. I've got the entire world built up pretty much, a decent cast of characters and some major events planned out, but other than that, no real idea what direction I want to go with it...

Pineapple, this is more common than you think. World-building is not the same thing as plotting. And, although it is hard to be sure from what you say, it sounds as if there's a possibility you have too many characters, which makes for a very confusing story unless you've plotted it very carefully.

The real joy of NaNo is letting yourself play with this stuff, have fun, explore the possibilities. Then, when it's all over, you go back and mine your rough draft for ideas, rework it, flesh it out, whatever it needs. Very few worthwhile books resemble their first drafts more than casually. (Yes, I'm a writer; one of the "serious" NaNo contenders. I will never, even in the depths of Week Four, deliberately pad my word count. Oh, I won't bother trying to edit the excess words that naturally form in my head - well, most of them, I actually do a bit of on-the-fly editing, even - but I am in it for real, not just so I can say I managed to string things out until I hit 50,000.)

It sounds like you're in this more for fun, which is fine. We all have our own motives. But anyone who has done much writing can tell you your situation isn't that unusual. It even happens to published authors whose names you might recognise. So my advice is, hang in there, do what you can, and have fun.

Thanks. I've done a ton of writing in the past, but it's been pretty much everything aside from a novel. Yeah, I probably have too many characters...once I started making them up, it was hard to stop.

I completely failed. Could barely get started. I'm bad at writing.