What's happening everybody? It's 11 days until the beginning of Nalton Rhymo I have outlined the first act of my novel and I'm going to share some of the stuff I've been doing in the preparation stages in order to help you guys to prepare for Nalton Rhymo itself. I know what you're thinking. 11 days? You can't plan a novel in 11 days. It's just foolish. It's poppycock. What are you talking about Jim? You can have the crack. Trust me as someone who went into it totally blind last year all this planning is actually going to help me a lot. So here's a couple of hints I'm going to share with you in order to help you through the Nalton Rhymo process. Hit one. Give yourself a personal target. Now, we all know that 50,000 words is the target at Nalton Rhymo and the OLL set out for you actual project in November. But we've all heard of overachievers targeting 100,000, 200,000 words novels by the end of the month. These people are crazy, but let's look at it this way. At least if they don't hit that 100,000 to 100,000 mark, then they're still more likely to hit that 50,000 then you know someone who says, okay, I'm just going to try to get that 50,000 by the end of the month. Say yourself a higher estimate target. For instance, I've set myself a target of 60,000 words. That's roughly the size of the average yarn novel to help myself. I've made myself a spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc, which is graphing out my word camp through the month and showing me whether or not I'm hitting my targets. If you want, you can download a copy of that spreadsheet and graph from my website. There's a link in the Vunderbar to the actual article. All you have to do is input your high end target into the bottom of the spreadsheet. It'll graph out everything you just put in your word camp per day. It's going to, you know, it'll help you out exponentially. I'm sure. Hint too. Think of the bigger picture. The plan that the structure of my novel's whole, I'll be using a method called the Rubit's Cube method by which I've got this nine squared diagram which plots out the nine elements of my narrative going to the three-act structure from the first and sighting incident to the finale. It's really helped me think of the bigger picture of my novel and it's helped me look at the themes and the pacing of it as well. Thirdly, the devil is in the details. Once you've got your Rubit's Cube outline of your novel, you need to look at things in a bit more detail. I'm talking in a chapter by chapter level. I've been using this method called phase outlining where I take chapter, I take the general events of that chapter and I break it up into short phases. I describe each phase and ten more bursts and then I intend to extrapolate on these in the actual writing process. I have a feeling it's probably going to improve my workflow for a number of reasons. One, it helps me consider the pace of the novel before I begin writing. Two, it means that I'm not going to have to deal with that weird writer's block where I just don't know where I'm going next because I already planned it out, step by step. And three, well I think one is here enough kind of. Hit four and this is literally the most important thing you can do in Nanorimal. Don't panic. If you don't write 50,000 words in a month, the novel police aren't going to come round to your door and show you a pair of handcuffs. Chris Batty is not going to judge you if you can't get your 50,000 word novel done in a month. It probably applaud you for trying. The whole point of Nanorimal isn't to have a fully polished product. It's about getting off your arse and trying to write. That's kind of all it's about. You don't need to have worn peace by the end of November. You don't have to have the next best Jan novel before the beginning of 2012, you know? At any writer I'll tell you, having deadlines makes things a lot more real, even in the theoretical exercises. So have fun, socialize, get to know other people doing that on your area. Go to writing. And try to affect your writer for 30 days. Anyway, those are my hints. I've got one last thing to say. I am running a sponsorship campaign this year hoping to raise $100 to aid the Office of Legends in light. The link in the Thunderbar to my fundraising appeal on stay classy. Please, if you can share and donate what you can, I'd really appreciate it. Oh well, they're doing really great stuff with their literary programs. It's really nice to see that they get a bit of support financially from those of us who are benefiting from this free thing that they're putting together for us. Anyway, that's all. I'll see you guys on the road. Peace.