I’ve discovered the joy of making book covers and, typically, got quite carried away with it. I have a request thread going over on the NaNo forums and it’s had a pretty good response. I also made some blank covers, “adoptables” if you will, some of which are still up for grabs. They’re all in this gallery folder (don’t mind the title and the name, I had to write something in them after all). Some examples:

If by some chance you’d like to adopt one, tell me the title and author name to put on it and it shall be done. I’ve also done a good few requests, and I really like how they turned out so I want to share some of them here:

I’ll probably end up making quite a few more before November starts. I still don’t have my plot worked out – in fact, I haven’t even decided on a story yet. Last week I ordered twelve books on Amazon and they arrived today, so I foresee a bit of difficulty with regards to getting things done. (And I’ve run out of shelf space, too…)

But I do have lots of ideas. If anyone out there is having problems with inspiration, I have some advice for you. One, spend time on the NaNoWriMo forums, especially Plot Doctoring, Adoption Society, and the Genre Lounges. And two – buy new books. Actually, you don’t even have to buy them. Just read the synopses on Amazon and your mind will probably start churning out ideas.

The downside to both of those things is that while they’ll probably give you ideas, they’ll also steal away the time you need to actually use those ideas. And this, in short, is why we need 36-hour days.

I visited friends over the weekend, so the only writing I got done was on the train there and back. Still, I’m creeping towards the finish line.

That won’t complete my novel. I’ve barely gotten started with the actual storyline, in fact. I’m pretty sure that once I’m finished, it’ll all be rewritten again. But that’s okay.

If you’re not doing so well, or if you’re lagging really behind, don’t give up! You’re probably hearing this all over the place at the moment and maybe it’s getting annoying. It annoyed me last year. I didn’t want to give up, but my story was being difficult, so I felt as if everyone who was telling me to keep going should’ve been yelling at my story instead.

Yell at your story if it’s being difficult. If your character is being obstinate, have them fall into a well and refuse to let them back out until they co-operate. If your story is missing key plot points, skip them. I’m serious about that. Sometimes, you don’t know how your characters get from A to B, but it doesn’t matter. Write them at A, write them at B, and at some point when you’ve finished and are reading back over it, the means of getting from A to B will fall into place. It might even be really, really obvious.

If you can’t come up with any more ideas, talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be an author. I was at a panel with Juliet E. McKenna who said that her engineer husband is a great person to discuss plot aspects with, because if something doesn’t work, he’ll spot it. Or find a solution.

It usually helps me to listen to the right music. I found some pretty epic music a while back, actually, by a band called Two Steps From Hell. It’s all instrumental, so it’s perfect for writing, and it sounds very epic. Check out Dragon Rider and Sons Of War and see if that doesn’t put you in the mood for great deeds. It does me, every time.

Still, sometimes, you get to the point where you have to take a step back and think about what you’re doing. And why you’re doing it. NaNo is an voluntary event for the arguably insane. It involves an arbitrary goal and an arbitrary deadline. It puts pressure on you to write, which is good, because pressure helps people do stuff. But sometimes, the pressure gets too much and instead of motivating, it starts to turn into an obstacle. It starts to crush you and make you feel like you can’t do anything anymore.

So take a step back, if you need to. Don’t worry about finishing. Even if you end up with 40,000, or 30,000, or just 10,000 words, that’s so many words more than you’d have written without NaNo. It’s still a win. You still win all of those words that you wrote. And you’ve still got your plot idea, or your characters, or your world, or all of those things.

Maybe all you’ll take away from NaNo is that this particular story won’t work. That’s what I learned last year. (I also learned that German with its ridiculously long compound words is a bad choice for a competition where the idea is to use as many separate words as possible.) This year, I learned three days in that a character needs to be a bit snappy or conflicted in order for me to write them; that’s a win, too.

So no pressure, okay? You do what you can, and no one can expect more from you. Take a break, go for a walk, bake a cake, relax.

Remember why you want to write. If there’s a part that you can’t wait to write, but you just can’t figure out how to get to it, skip ahead. Write it. Throw chronology out the window if that will get you back into the zone. You can connect the dots later. Right now, skipping ahead and writing chapter 17 is better than staying chronological and not writing chapter 6.

No matter what happens, don’t let it get you down. You want to write a novel. By signing up for NaNo, you’ve already done more than most people ever do towards that goal. Maybe it won’t be perfect, maybe it won’t be finished by the end of November, but it’ll be a lot more than most people ever manage, and you should be proud of that. We should all be proud of that. I am. I’m proud of you.

For a miracle, I’m actually well ahead of my target word count at the moment.

Don’t let that fool you, though. It doesn’t mean that I spend the whole day writing. It’s just that I don’t have a job, or anything else I need to be doing, so I have a lot of time to procrastinate and still get some writing done. In honour of that (sort of), I’m going to share ten of my favourite techniques for procrastination here.

1. Clean up your room. Or the whole house. If you’ve already done that, do it again. If you really run out of things to clean, you can always vacuum the air. There’s always dust in the air. It’s about time it was cleaned up, don’t you think?

2. Write postcards and letters to random people you met on the forums and exchanged addresses with. That’s a trip for buying cards, the time you spend writing your message to them in neat calligraphy, another trip for buying stamps, another for posting them, if you’re clever about it.

3. Draw your characters. Preferably in scenes you haven’t written yet. If you can’t draw, use The Sims or something, or you could always scour the internet for celebrity pictures. It’s hardly your fault that said pictures tend to appear on sites with simply intriguing, absolutely must-read headlines and articles, is it? Anyone would get distracted.

4. Exchange Facebook comments or emails with people you haven’t talked to in over a year. My distant acquaintances’ new shoes/pet escapades/random complaints have never been as interesting as they are this November.

5. Search YouTube or iTunes for new music to listen to. Your NaNo novel needs the perfect soundtrack if you’re going to write it properly, and with so much music out there, you, of course, have to sample as much of it as you possibly can. All in the name of Doing It Right. (I have five werewolf songs now, in three different languages. Thank you, YouTube, for introducing me to Schandmaul.)

6. The NaNo forums. Enough said. They’re a miracle. You have a community whose members are all Extremely Busy with something in November, and yet, November is by far the most active month – with levels of activity that put other forums to shame. And making forum posts isn’t the thing that everyone is so Extremely Busy with. It’s like a riddle. And I shouldn’t encourage you to visit them, for the love of your word count, but I’m going to anyway. They’re fun. And also inspiring. But mainly, that’s just the reason we use as an excuse to hang around there and discuss world-moving questions like What Happens When You Eat Yourself (ya rly).

7. Walk your dog. Or your cat. Your cat probably won’t like being walked, but that just means it’ll take longer. If you have neither cat nor dog, walk your hamster or your budgie, and if you’re entirely out of animals or only have fish, buy some balloons or just walk by yourself. Walking is good for you.

8. Bake cookies. Cookies are what makes the world go around, and they’re also what fuels the Dark Side, and NaNoWriMo is definitely of the Dark Side. Forever will it dominate your destiny. So you should bake some cookies, or if you can’t bake, go out and buy cookies and put them in the oven for a while and just pretend because that’s what all the best writers do best. Everyone knows that most fantasy novels are basically store-bought Tolkien cookies that someone put in the oven for a while.

9. Research. You should’ve done this in October, but oh well, October is over now so there’s nothing for it. And of course you need to know the average height of a sheep or the exact dimensions of the Mona Lisa or the rate at which apples decay in a temperate oceanic climate, otherwise that throwaway sentence you’re about to write just won’t make any sense at all. Time for Wikipedia. Or, if you’re feeling hardcore, TVTropes. Don’t click that link. It will eat your time. And your soul. And possibly your cookies. Seriously.

10. Write a blog post about all the wonderful ways of procrastinating that you’ve learned. The internet – nay, the world! – needs that blog post. Absolutely.

I’m actually quite amazed that I’m on track, because I’ve done pretty much all of this. I replaced the cat-walking with shoring up the gate of my garage, because the rain was getting through and my cat doesn’t like rain and she lives in the garage, so it seemed doubly cruel to send her out into it when, y’know, she was already in it, sort of, already. (Can you tell that I’ve got into the habit of being verbo… using lots of words when a few would do? Yes? Oh.) I haven’t baked any cookies yet, but trust me, the Dark Side is strong in this one. Sometimes I amaze even myself.

I’m done with Star Wars quotes now. You’re welcome to add to this – either the list, or the quotes, or both – if you have any ideas! In the meantime, happy procrastinating. I mean writing.