National NaNoWriMo Doing Month!

I've done NaNo enough times that I can say, with confidence, 50k words in a month isn't a serious problem for me. So if I do it again, it's going to be about something more than just the wordcount; I tend to find that by the end of the month it feels like a slog.

I am totally up for any sort of corpse-ing, though. And yes, I know I am inviting all sorts of contexts to be taken out of that sentence but I don't even care.

I'm okay with this. An occasional thousand words is deffers something I can do without being knocked flat on my ass with essays. And branching paths does mean we have even more glorious chances for all of this to go spectacularly off the rails.

Plus we can get a bunch of new writey writes in!

We may have to do it adventure style if we do this in Choose Your Own Adventure format: we pick one path and stick to it. Alternatively, we could have a gentleman's agreement that we should prefer the longest ongoing path, but can switch back to any earlier fork if we feel the story's getting stale.

I'm thinking about nanomango again, someone remind me that i'm shit at challenges

Will you enjoy doing it more than you will regret not finishing it or forcing yourself to keep working? turn to page 7

will the guilt and resentment you feel overpower the pleasant parts of the project? turn to page nevermind

Whatever i end up making will be finished at some point, its just whether or not its during the month of november 2015 that it happens or not

i've been thinking of giving it a try this year

partially because my brother already has a massive manuscript for a scifi novel that he won't let me read >:[

Steal and burn

Steal

And

Burn

hey look, again

corpse nano

none of the commitment

all of the fun

Corpse NaNo CYOA Edition: None of the Commitment, All of the Fun!

Hey, so. I get that we, as a group, are terrible at commitment, but if you're interested and otherwise not gonna do much for NaNo this year, why not put your hand up in here and let's give it a try?

If we can get at least five of us together, we can do like last time we did it and go in 5000 word chapter, five sets of one thousand words. We'll add the stipulation that the end of each chunk needs to have a choose your own adventure style choice, and that once each chapter is published the start person has the choice of continuing from any existing fork.

---

So in Step Form:

1) We establish a five-person chain, based on... I don't know, whoever yells 'first' in this thread first. It goes, say... ABCDE.

2) Volunteer A, after paying the entrance fee of one soul, writes a thousand words, ending with a CYOA-style choice. Binary choices preferred, not a strict rule.

3) Volunteer B, one soul later, reads what A has written, chooses a choice, and writes on from that. B ends their part with another choice.

4) Volunteer C does not read what A has written. They only get to choose from B's choice and work from there. They end their part with yet another choice. Also their soul is gone too.

5) Volunteer D... etc. Souls.

6) Finally, Volunteer E does all of that as well. Maybe we should stipulate that the last person in the chain also has to end the chapter somehow? But in any case, they too will end their bit with a choice.

7) The entire chapter is published for everyone to read! Next round of volunteers and souls are brought forward! Say that the next chain is volunteers FGHIJ.

8) Volunteer F can then pick any choice given thus far and work from there. This is to prevent the solidification of canon, since people didn't like that last time.

9) The rest of the chain follows on as normal from F's bit, which should end in another set of choices.

10) Repeat ad nauseaum.

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If we can get enough people I'm definitely interested. What say us, hey?

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I'm thinking about nanomango again, someone remind me that i'm shit at challenges

Unrelated to corpse nano (sorry guys) but i'm going to post in here for accountability

I'm making a small zine comic each week of november; 1st one is going to be 12 pages long! Help

Maybe it's just because I'm not awake yet (and feel even more not awake because Daylight Savings Time) but that whole setup feels a bit needlessly convoluted?

At the least, I'm in favor of dropping the expectation that you hold off on reading parts. Read as much or as little as you want. I feel like a lack of information isn't key to the concept.

I mean, if I'm the only one who thinks that I'm happy to go along with the rules, it's just right now I feel like that's making the explanation overly-complicated and doesn't have that strong a reason for it. Again, this might just be me not being very awake yet.

Totally up for writing, not awake enough to start something yet (but I will if nobody else has volunteered by, let's say, noon).

Yeah, but corpse nano is supposed to go into weird and unexpected places because everyone is making shit up on the fly

Yeah, but reading the whole chapter doesn't interfere with that too much, as long as people are writing fast enough. I will grant that reading less can speed things up, but I just don't feel it really adds anything to make that an actual rule.

I'm in.

I recommend we use Choicescript for this. It's the thing I used for the Select Your Own Pick A Choice in Order and Chaos, and if you're just doing a simple CYOA it couldn't be simpler. Nobody'd have to download or learn anything, just avoid indentation in the body of the text and format their end choice like so:

Code:

*choice
  #To enter the cave of time, go to page 2.
    *goto_scene page2
  #To enter the cave of space, go to page 3.
    *goto_scene page3

And then the next person's entry just goes in a "page2.txt" file (or a Google doc that would be that if it were saved locally on someone's computer.) At the end, one person can compile it all, and we actually get a copy we can play through! (If this sounds too hard, it'd also be a cinch to retrofit...)

Count me in for team "don't read any more than you have to." How else is the crazy train gonna run off the rails? Likewise, IIRC the last time you guys did it you kept everything in one Google doc and then trusted in the power of Google doc bookmarks, which is like, such a crazy way to do it and didn't consistently work, at least on my end (which is why I didn't join in.) Even if we don't go with the above I STILL think we should have every page on a separate document.

I am a firm believer in the power of crazy trains to run off the rails whether people are leaving chapters unread or not. It's a matter of style, not how informed you are.

In any case, I've slapped together a beginning in a Google Document so we can get the writing started. It's not my best work, but hopefully it provides a foundation people can do something with.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pLtT...zhAc8/edit

If we're changing the formatting, I don't mind and whoever is willing to put in the work can copy that one; but if we keep going with Google Docs, I have a folder here that should be set up so other people with the link can add chapters:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0...0FVZWFGZXM

I guess me next. Woop zoop, I'm going for it.

e: Aw, no edit rights? I guess I'll make another doc and copy it over ¬_¬

e: e: wait, did... did people already start, or does your writes have dividers, fogel? I'm so confused.

Mine has dividers because I had trouble getting any individual scene to 1000 words.

I thought I gave it edit rights but apparently not.

Your entire folder is view only fogel

That's fixed now. Google Drive did not make it very clear that I was setting things to view-only when I set it to be accessible to anyone with the link.

Apparently setting the folder to "anyone with the link can edit" also set it for the document, or at least that's what it looked like when I checked the settings. If it's not working let me know and I'll see what I can do.

It's been a while since I used Google Drive for this kind of purpose, so I'm not surprised I missed something.

Chapter 1, Part 2 has been created. I've gone and made a new doc for it, so that the next person doesn't have to go scrolling while not looking. I hope this can be the convention from now on?

So anyone who wants to go next and isn't me or fogel, give us a post post

week one is done

Chapter 1, Part 3 has been created, by a lovely guest writer from another circle. This means that Part 4 is open! Does anyone want to put themselves forward?

It's that time of the year again, and for that purpose I have revived this thread, which I have never read, through the power of the search function in order to COMMIT to this. Meaning that if I ever want to be a published author (my dream) I'll have to do this. Already got an idea in mind, but not much else. LET'S DO THIS.

e: upon further reflection it seems that this is more like the thread for group nanowrimos and stuff, which i am not doing. would it be more prudent to make a separate thread for individual goals?

Day 1: 2200 words
Day 8: I'm stalling out a bit because work is killing me, but I'm at 9,400 words.