NaNoWriMo strategies

National Novel Writing Month is approaching fast.  The St Louis kick off party is on Sunday 28th at the Clayton Bread Co. from 4-6pm, Hubby and I will be there in our NaNoWriMo 2007 t-shirts.  My basic rule of NaNoWriMo is "write every day and make at least one character miserable."  I pulled together some NaNoWriMo writing tips after finishing my second novel that may come in handy for newbies.

Then there are the bribes.  These are things I would have gone out and bought, but are reserved for meeting a specific word count goal.  I have a CD picked out for the halfway mark and an 1892 Columbus coin for the big finish.  I love old stuff, and this is the first commemorative coin produced in the US.  Dave in the coin store is poised to dig out a good one for me, but only if I finish the novel.

A huge help in meeting those word count goals are Hubby's official NaNoWriMo word count widgets.  These are little images that pull your word count history from your NaNoWriMo profile and display a graph on your blog, forum signature, LiveJournal, or wherever you can put an HTML image.  They have not been deployed on the NaNo server yet, and I hope they're up really really soon.  I am hugely proud of him for writing these and getting them adopted by NaNoWriMo, and the new crop of 2007 widgets is certifiably awesome!  I love spotting them on webpages in November and it is a great motivator to make the bar for the day turn from red to green.  All you have to do is update your word count on the NaNo site.

Hubby's also going to be in one of the NaNo Q & A spots in November talking about the widgets.  He wrote them in 2004 for my first NaNoWriMo attempt and has improved them every year.  In 2006 they were taken on as the official NaNoWriMo wordcount widgets, hosted on NaNo's servers.