Saturday, October 31, 2020

NaNoWriMo 2020: To Go Even Further Beyond!

As we can all agree this year's been all weird. Days go by so quickly now. It's almost like a bad depression. Nothing's happening in our personal lives and things don't move forward, yet so much happens to all of us at once. Just recently the health information including ID's of tens of thousands of Finns was hacked even! That might be the largest scale crime ever in this country, if we're being real. I've heard quite a few people around me get their info's hacked. It's important to understand that

Anyway, I haven't been able to concentrate on things at all this entire year because of personal things that've been in my mind for the past four years. I'm not sure if 'problem' is the right word for these personal things but these have been mentally extremely exhausting regardless. This entire thing with Covid along with stuff happening and most importantly not happening in real life have culminated to this point where I'm planning on writing about them. 

 

 
Writer Jerry Jenkins talking about publishing books

Now, in couple of hours over here at Finland it's going to be the 1st of November, 2020 and it's time to participate on the NaNoWriMo project. It's an online project which aims to motivate writers to write a book of at least 50 000 words. You will aim to write a real book on one month. A year ago I wrote a 258-page long document with larger fonts etc. which was about 65 000 words. In I believe 2016 I wrote a 60 000 word fictional story in normal fonts that was about 98 pages, if my memory serves me correctly. So there's the ballpark of how many pages you'll be planning for at least. This year's different however as I'm going to try to see how many words an official book would be like (so the structure will be as close to an official one as I can get it).

For the past two years I've been planning on creating three kinds of books: an informative one, a nonfiction story that's based on my perception of actual real-life events, as well as a fictional detective story (we call them 'dekkari' over here in Finland btw). These three stories are things that've been bothering me for the longest and I feel like I've been stuck in a psychological limbo caused by events that come from outside, it's very weird but I think anyone can understand them as things that happen to your close ones also affect you too in a domino effect. So I decided to finally really work on them to cleanse my mind. By the way, did you know that writing can be helpful to keep yourself healthier? There's a reason why people write their day-to-day activities even on personal notebooks that no one else will ever see. 

 

Three folders ready to go! Not in order and with placement titles.

As these are stories that I've been planning for years, instead of writing them again from top to bottom I decided re-write down all the things I've written so far in a more formal format and then continue from where I left them in the previous years. The reason for doing this is also to catch up on what I was thinking and where the story was going. For the nonfiction / real life based ones I personally know them practically inside-out but I need to change people's and places names to fictional ones of course. There's a lot to do but it's been a while since I've went at something all-out. My university studies are suffering a lot but this entire year's been a complete flop for me regardless. I'm trying to do something to get back up here. Ah, I'm also starting to exercise again as physical exercise is healthy for mental health. I can suggest people to run with running poles as your arms actually do help you run further distances. Try it. You'll notice the biggest differences during hill running as that really takes a toll on your arms but you're most likely able to run much more than without the poles and it's also great that more of your body will get that physical stress from just running.


I'm literally not even going to worry about this - I'll definitely aim to do my best! If it takes 200 pages a week to do this I think it's time to pull up all nighters. Which is scary as I've calculated that I might need to make 20 pages a day! We have 30 days to do this.


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