Book Addict's Blog

Yes, that's NaRoWriMo and not NaNoWriMo. You see, I decided today that November is National Role-Play Writing Month for me.  I don't write short stories, and I most definitely don't write novels. Instead, I collaborate in telling stories with my fellow players on several play-by-post, forum RPGs. I'm not very good about keeping up with these, however, and the last couple of weeks especially, I've been rather too lazy to post for my characters on these forums.  So I decided I needed motivation, and since it's NaNoWriMo for others, I thought I'd adapt the idea to fit my own style of storytelling.

Now, the 50,000 word goal of NaNoWriMo will not work for me.  First of all, I'm a slow writer, and so I simply don't have the time to write that many words. While this month won't be nearly as busy as last month was for me, I still have 18 credits worth of schoolwork (including a major paper and an exam) on top of my other activities. I'm also starting a day late.  Second, the format of RP writing is different from that of a novel. It's true that I'll have it easier in some respects. I don't have to come up with a plot with a defined beginning, middle, and end; I have other players to help me come up with ideas; and I already know most of my characters fairly well.  On the other hand, I do have to worry about quality as well as quantity.  My posts don't have to be rewritten and polished, but they do have to be good enough so that I'm not embarrassed about others reading them.  Further, I am somewhat limited in the fact that I have to wait for another player to reply to my post before I can write another one. Normally, I'm the one people are waiting on, but that's not always the case.

So what have I decided on as a goal? My original goal was 12,500, a quarter of the official NaNoWriMo goal.  However, I just copied and pasted all of my posts for the month of October into a Word file, and found that I wrote over 10,000 words last month. That's rather close to my original goal, and I want to press myself harder than that.  So I am now aiming for 25,000 words. I may not make it, but at least it's worth a try!