NaNoWriMo is around the bend! And so is Cake. No lie.

I'm officially registered for NaNoWriMo this year which happens in November. My name is leolewis if anyone wants to add me as a buddy.

What is NaNoWriMo? Check out the link. It's a challenge where many writers across the globe attempt to write a book in an entire month. (A book being defined as 50,000 words. In reality, that's a pretty short book, but hey, we're doing it in a month.)

I feel I am more prepared now than last year (which was my first try). In 2008 I made it to 30,000 words, 10,000 of those being written on the last day in November over a period of 9 hours straight. My butt was pretty sore after that.

But this year I've already started outlining, using a method called Phrase Drafting. I'm combining it a little bit with the Snowflake method. We'll see how it works.

Does anyone have experience with either of these methods? Do they work for you? Don't work? What does work for you?

Ok, now it's off to bed to dream about my wonderful characters while I can. I'm sure by the time November blows over I'll be sick of them.

MDA:

What's a metaphor for NaNoWriMo?

Highlight the text to see my example if you need inspiration:

Example: NaNoWriMo is a piece of cake.

It sits there at the end of the dinner table just waiting to be eaten. It promises me it will be easy to eat. But I have to get through my vegetables in a hurry before I can even take a bite. As I shovel peas into my mouth, I gag. As I look at the steamy bowl of characters before me, knowing my mother will make me eat some of those too, I get a little queasy. Then I remember the cake, and I make myself be more patient. Soon my mother is putting really tough and dry plot meat onto my plate. It's tough to chew. I try to wash it down with some setting, but it doesn't help. Finally, after three hours of arguing with my mother about how many vegetables I have to eat, and asking if I really have to clean my plate, I get to bite into that delicious piece of raspberry-I-finished-neener-neener-inner-critic-cheese cake.

Like

The other day a friend of the family came up to me and said his daughter had told him I talk differently than other people.
“Oh, really?” I asked.
“Yes. She said you never,...um...use extra words,...like....you know.....like....” And then he smiled. “You don’t use the word ‘like’ except when it’s actually called for.”
I appreciated his daughters observations. Few people would recognize that.

It got me thinking about the word ‘like’ and how people misuse it. I had assumed before that people who use the word ‘like’ in an excessive way are ignorant of the finer points of English. But I soon realized, they are actually using one of the more powerful tools of the English language: the metaphor.

Next time someone uses ‘like’ in a sentence, stop and think what it means. If my friend says, “I, like, totally assumed there was going to be cake.” my friend is not saying, in the technical sense, that she actually assumed there was going to be cake. She’s saying her actions of thinking were very close to assuming there was going to be cake, but never quite made it there.
Sometimes when I come across a metaphor in literature or poetry, I wish I could ask the writer what they meant and connect the dots a little more for me. So next time someone says ‘like’ in a sentence, catch them off balance and ask “What do you mean? How is your thinking like assuming there would be cake and how is it not like?”

Note: This will drive you insane.

Since this is my first post, I won’t bother with the metaphor of the day assignment because I first want to explain what a metaphor is and how to use it. I also want to detail instructions for the MDA and am not sure what they will be yet.