The NaNoWriMo website appears to finally be functional, so I thought I’d drop in here and point you to my profile. If you’re taking part this year, add me as a writing buddy. I don’t know what writing buddies do, exactly, but if nothing else I can spy on your word count like the big voyeur I am.

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A handy tool, if you’re planning your NaNo digitally, is FreeMind. It’s a Java-based mind-mapping program that’s quite easy to use. I’ve been experimenting with it while sketching up characters and trying to tie together some sort of plot. I think I prefer to plan on paper, but this is a great alternative.

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Suzie at Words, Words, Words makes a good point about the daily word count goal in her Ten Tips for NaNoWriMo post:

1667 words a day. That’s actually not a lot. Rather than say to yourself I am going to sit down from 7.30-9.3pm every night you should grab every spare minute you have. This is more useful if you have a laptop - you can write in coffee shops whilst waiting for someone, or on the bus on your way to work. Even if you have a desktop computer though, every time you get a spare ten minutes write a couple of paragraphs. They all add up.

1667 words a day really shouldn’t be too hard to hit if I can manage to just write without looking back. I won’t edit, I won’t stop to find the perfect word, and I won’t even reread what I wrote. Just dump the contents of my mind onto paper and then get on with life.

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In the comments for Suzie’s post, Jessica had this tip to share:

The article suggested using a spread sheet program for your outline. In column 1 number the scenes, in column 2 tell what chapter(s) the scene appears in, in column 3 tell the point of view character of the scene, and in column 4 describe of the scene.

I really like this idea. When planning a story, I tend to start by coming up with a lot of random scenes and trying to piece the them together afterwards in a logical order. This will make shifting scenes in the outline a lot easier.