October is upon us! It’s time for the coffee*, comfy socks and cosy jumpers!
*other hot & cold beverages available.
If you’re going to be taking part in NaNoWriMo, then here are some things you can be getting on with to get you through your first week of Preptober. First of all, you might be thinking;
Lisa,What the heck is Preptober?
Basically it means you’re going to use the month of October to prepare for November and the 50k writing challenge you’ve just taken on.
How do you prepare? Well, everyone does it differently but over the next month I’m going to try and outline a few ways that I get ready for the delightful chaos that is NaNoWriMo.
Tasks for this week
Sign up for NaNoWriMo if you haven’t done so already! Once you’ve done that you can fill out your profile! With the updated NaNoWriMo website, you can now add a header image as well as an avatar. Gifs work in the header, too! (I found out by accident after clicking the wrong file.)
Add some writing buddies! Here’s my link if you’d like to add me.
To me, writing buddies are an absolute necessity. You need people to keep you accountable, to hype you up when you’re not feeling the writing bug that day, and to compete against, trying to keep your word count above theirs!
Find your Home Region! By selecting a home region, you can access a small localised forum which will be occupied by other Wrimos who live in and around your local area. These are used for organising write-ins and group chats during November, as well as getting to know some of your fellow Wrimos. You can either scroll through the list or type your location into the search bar. For example, mine would look like this:
Europe :: England :: Elsewhere
Explore the NaNoWriMo forums! There are many forums to be getting around, from the coffeehouses (general chat) to the appellation station (help with naming characters, sidekicks, pets and everything in between) and even genre specific forums.
The downside about the forums is that there are so many! They can be very distracting, so let yourself have some time to wander through them now but come November, you must try to resist them until after you’ve completed your daily word count goal, otherwise you’ll have spent hours in there before you know it.
That should be enough to keep you occupied for this week! I’ll be back next Monday with some more NaNoPrep ideas for Week 2.
Lisa Stapleton 