Approx Half-way In

So, this NaNoWriMo thing... So far, I'm very happy for this experience.

Made a bunch of new friends, I'm able to talk about writing-type things with a huge variety of people, group encouragement is definitely awesome (especially in chat rooms, where the official purpose is kinda "encourage everybody to actually write by running word wars- where people all start writing for a break of time, like 10 minutes, then come back and say how many you got, not for competition but for a little kick in the ass of "Write right meow!" in manageable chunks of time- but in reality managing to hang out and shoot the shit and brainstorm as well as doing wars, which is awesome!).

I've already figured out that this novel I'm pantsing is never going to be able to be published without copious re-working and re-writing, which I'm not enamoured enough to do... It's not so much for bad writing, which can be edited out, but for the fact that it decided to be a rip-off of Alan Dean Foster's Flix series, and then morphed into a truly hideous rip-off of Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series, which is really fun to read and invoked copious amounts of Rule of Cool, but plagiarizing somebody else's ideas is definitely not a cool thing to do, so yeah. I'll probably make a few passes at editing, just for the learning experience and improving my own writing, but this will never get published and I'm actually cool with this.

At least I got to play with a few experiments; writing in second person, keeping the Main Character's gender obscured, writing a sex scene in second person while keeping said MC's gender obscured, writing in first person with that character's gender obscured...Oddly enough, it's easier for me to write in second person than first, though third person is alright (and it's a classic for story-telling, so I might stick with that for my attempts at a publishable work).

Mostly, what this has taught me is that when you just focus for a bit, writing actually isn't all that difficult. You're supposed to write 1,667 words every day, but I find myself pretty easily managing to hit 2.5k or more (as long as I don't let myself quit just because I hit the quota, which is surprisingly difficult to do. Guess I'm lazy to the bone...) And it's been pretty much pure fun playing in the sandbox, so that's awesome as well!

I already have an idea for what I'll do for next year's NaNo (if not sooner), because a cute little plot bunny came to nibble on my brain during a dream some time ago, so I'll have to do some research, world-building, and maybe even make a loose outline before I go again, and maybe then I'll actually have written a book worthy of editing and trying to publish!

Also, after seeing a bunch of people asking for naming advice, that inspired me to go research phonosemantics (which is actually really cool), and here's a good, succinct source for that (which actually required stupid amounts of googling). Honestly, after running an analysis on my chosen name (yes, I have quite deliberately chosen a new name for myself), it rather suits me as a person well, so there's another brink in the construction of this name this suits me ^.^