It’s day three and I haven’t even hit 1000 words. As I wrote yesterday, I’m having a tough time getting to the action. I have tons of ideas but not sure how to execute them.

This morning I spent about 15 minutes writing out one-line descriptions of some of the major events I want to cover in part one. I hope this is good progress because now I just have to go flesh out those sections.

I think Part One will focus on the mother of the main character. She’s very religious and conservative (but I want to avoid making her a caricature or unsympathetic). For over ten years now I’ve wanted to do something involving The Binding of Isaac so I have plans to incorporate that into Part One.

Overall I’m feeling better about the direction of things today than I did yesterday. Tonight is writing with coworkers so hopefully I’ll make some serious progress.

NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30. I tried it back in 2003 but only got to 12,000 words. That piece had was called Red Eye Reduction. At that point in my life I had been unemployed and finally started getting job interviews (and eventually a job) so other things too priority.

This year life isn’t quite as crazy (still working on getting over the post-breakup angst from when my boyfriend of four years and I broke up back in June) and I’m doing NaNoWriMo with a couple of coworkers. Doing this with someone else will be great for encouragement and keeping me on track. It’s like having buddies to go to the gym with.

Last time I wrote my own software to track how I did and posted everything publicly on my blog. This time around I plan to keep things in Word docs because it’s easier. Also having everything on a blog makes it difficult to go back and re-write things from earlier, etc. etc.

That doesn’t mean that technology won’t play a big part in my writing. I’m currently trying to figure out how I want to utilize stuff like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Evernote, and old fashioned stuff like thumb drives (I have a Star Wars one with Star Killer on it!) and my old Moleskine notebook from my friend Molly. Somehow I’m sure it will all come together — I’ll try to post updates on what works best, etc.

To get prepared over the weekend I bought a set of Star Wars Legos at the store and built the Slave I (Boba Fett’s ship) Lego set. I figured it would get some creative juices flowing (along with some frustration juices because I’m almost positive one of the pieces was missing). I also watched the movies Halloween (the original) and Scream 2 and Scream 3. Not sure how much those movies will influence me, but you never know.

Tonight I plan to re-read some of the previous stuff I’ve written and go over notes I’ve written down in various philosophy/theory books I’ve read. I know I always feel very inspired and creative when reading stuff by Slavoj Žižek, so I’ll surely be flipping through Looking Awry and others.

I also have a couple ideas for creativity/inspiration exercises that I may be posting here. I’d love comments as it keeps me encouraged and gives me even new ideas to play off of.

Wish me luck and here we go…!