How Do Authors Prepare for NaNoWriMo? & Word Count Wednesday

Well, I've been doing a lot of thinking about NaNoWriMo and all your suggestions from yesterday.  I googled around a bit at what other people do to prepare for NaNo and I found a few blogs that gave me an idea of how it's done by others.

What Jordan McCollum does to gear up for NaNo

Writer's Digest & Four Steps for Outlining your NaNo Book

Preparing the Pantsless Way by Amber West

Preparing with Erika Liodice

What You Should Be Doing to Prepare for NaNo


For someone who's never done NaNoWriMo I found these and a lot of other blogs that were helpful in knowing what to expect if an author does choose to do NaNo and it also told me that everyone does it different.  So many people just dive in with no prep and others do a ton of prep!  It's just like the writing process I suppose---everyone does it different.

After reading through all of this I've decided to go ahead and try to do NaNo this year.  I signed up as JulieBellon and apparently you can friend people there, so if you want, please come friend me.  I'd still like to do something on the blog on a smaller scale and of course, let you know how it's going for me.  It's a bit scary to do NaNo for all the reasons I mentioned yesterday, but most things worth doing were a bit scary in the beginning I think.

I've decided to write Colby's story (from All Fall Down) for my NaNo story, and I have a few ideas for the opening chapters.  But so far, that's all I've got.

I didn't write at all this week, but I thought a lot about writing.  Does that count?  How did you do?  And if I'm doing NaNo does that change your mind at all about doing it, too?