I went back to this one, but I'm drinking mango lassi today. Shoo, shoo, I'm being very fancy. I'm going back to the tactics. I'm drinking my Oubos tea. I have a friend who told me about a new tea that I'll try next week if we can get a hold of it. Ooh, okay, okay, I'm intrigued. My tea, yeah. Might actually have a real tea for the first time. But please just make sure you drink it properly. Please say you use a kettle, at least whirl the water. I will warm the water on the stove in the kettle. There you go. Thank you very much. I'll steep the tea, then I'll mix in my mix. You don't have to just use a kettle is all I'm saying, because, you know, our torturous it was for me to live in America for six years, and I had to microwave my tea. It was terrible. What? Because why did you have a kettle? What? I have a kettle. I'm in the United States. I've had kettle since we got married because it's the only way my husband will heat up water for anything. Listen, Vegas can't be chooses. I went to go stay with a family. They don't have a kettle. Do you think I'm especially going to buy a kettle? No. That's fair. That's fair. You're not at your own house or your own apartment. That makes sense. Are you ever waiting for this episode? Because I am. I am so ready for this episode. Let's get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Tea and Tales. I'm now. And I'm Sarah. We want to thank everyone who has been listening to our podcast on whatever platform you are coming to us from. We especially want to thank Michelle, Rizzo, and Mary Jane Props. Thank you so much for following us, for sharing, and for watching. Well, I'm excited about today's episode because I know nothing about today's episode. So Sarah, what are we going to be talking about today is our first in a five episode series on NaNoWriMo. To help us with this, we have our guest speaker. Her name is Ariana Bell. Welcome Ariana to Tea and Tales. We're so happy to have you with us today. And I'm happy to be here with you ladies. Thank you. You're welcome. So we're talking about NaNoWriMo and pairing our story today. A lot of people, your first question is what is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo is short for national novel writing month. And it is exactly how Ariana and I met was doing NaNoWriMo together back in 2017. We've been friends for seven years. The power of NaNoWriMo. I feel I'm just going to sit throughout this whole episode and be like nodding my head because I've never done NaNoWriMo in my life before. I accidentally stumbled upon it. Like I stumbled upon a chocolate board in my mouth. Well, I'm happy to be part of it. So, Ariana, before we get into the meat of how to prepare your story for NaNoWriMo, tell us a little bit about you. What do you write and how can people find you? I write mostly contemporary romance now. I bend toward the cozy side. I am dipping my toes in some romantic suspense nowadays. Also, I really love to do detailed fantasy novels primarily based in European mythology, which I know is out of vogue currently. But I write this for me. And that's just as important as writing about other people. Okay, well, okay, Sarah, now that we are talking about NaNoWriMo, is that like a yearly thing? Is it a monthly thing? Is it a daily thing? Like what is that? Is it every four months now or is it no? Because there's November and there's April and there's July. But the other two in the middle are Camp NaNoWriMo and they are less formal. Okay. Yes. Well, NaNoWriMo is writing 50,000 words in the month of November. And then your Camp NaNo's in April and July, you can kind of choose what you want to do. If you want to have a different word count, if you want to be editing instead of writing, you can choose and kind of play around with what your goal is. The idea of NaNoWriMo is building that daily habit to get your writing done, to move forward with your projects, whether it's writing a brand new manuscript or finishing that manuscript you've been wanting to finish. Why do I get if I finish and I get my 50,000 words? You get coupons to a lot of writing related apps, activities, websites. I actually started publishing on Amazon because one of the prizes was that if you set up your book on Kindle, on Create Space, as they called it back then, you would get a free copy of your book. Ooh, I didn't realize that in doing so, I was publishing it. You know, you learn from your, I don't want to say mistakes, you learn from your enthusiasm. Happy accidents. I just wanted to look at it and then it's like, wait, this is public, how did that happen? You're now a self-published author anyway, and so it went out too soon was all. I was leaning towards that line anyway, but I just kind of stumbled out the door, you might say. There was no warning, there was no preparation. I just wanted a physical copy of my book and I didn't want to pay staples for it. And some other of the prizes are things like autocrit or pro-writing aid or scrivener will give you free trials or discounted prices to use their software and see if you like it. And they're all things that a lot of authors will use. Sometimes you get discounts on people's seminars. So it's worth looking through, but the biggest purpose is get that writing then. Okay, but what happens if you don't hate your 50,000 words? As much as I love being under pressure, I don't like being under pressure. So I think that's why I haven't done Nana Raima is because if I know I only have a month to do 50,000 words and I get to like day 24 and I'm like 10,000 words and I'm like, what is this happening to me? And then I feel just nervous and then I'm going to have like a little breakdown and then it's all going to end well. The only thing that happens depends on who you're writing with. Okay, so you can do groups. If they're a nice group, they'll just say you're fine. Just keep going. If you have a main group, then you might want to find a new group, but unless you need that as the motivation, some people need to be yelled at. I don't know, in my case, I just started it because somebody mentioned it to me in college and I was like, there's some way to keep track of all the stuff I'm writing. I got addicted to the word counter, but no, Nana Raima was generally a very welcoming and encouraging environment and they don't send anything out that like condemns you for not keeping up. It's supposed to help you not to just demoralize you. And you can always try again the next time. I tend to pad out my words actually with outline. So what happens is instead of actually just writing free like prose, I will take some time and write a detailed outline. Maybe I'll add in a quote or two. Maybe I'll say, I need this character to suffer right here. And then they do. I will go through later on when I need more words and that one sentence will become prepared graphs. So you're still adding to the word count. I don't know if any of you've heard about this, someone told me that if you write your manuscript and you like have a scene that you don't like necessarily know where you want it to go, or you're like, this should be a specific color, but I don't know what color yet and I will get back to it later. You literally type the word TK next to each other. And then once your manuscript is finished, then you go to the find and you type in TK and then all those places where you haven't done anything or you wanted to add something or you wanted to make a description bigger or something like that, then you can just go there and fix that because there aren't any words where T and K is next to each other. So only those will surface when you go and find it. That's okay. Yeah. Right. Well, I speak for English. Other languages might have to use K's next to each other, but I'm not going to introduce you to Greek. I use the parentheses and then I search for the parentheses. I don't even know character names when I start writing sometimes, so I'll put something like that and then search for everything that says parentheses named mom parentheses replaced with this name I now have. Gotcha. That works. Yeah. So many different ways of doing things. Part of NaNoWriMo is learning your technique, your style, how you get motivated for writing, how you like to put a story together. We're putting this out before NaNoW because some of you out there are super, super planners and some of you just want to have an idea. Now, if you're like me, that planning is basically, "Hey, I have this great idea and a character and I'm just going to go with it and see where it takes me." My eyes. Yeah. It doesn't take a lot of planning. Sometimes I might get excited and make a world map because fantasy world maps. So often I go in just like, "Let's just see where the wind takes me. Let's just go for it." That's why I end up doing two or three projects because sometimes I'm like, "Oh, well, that one was a bad end. Let's try something else." Oopsie found an ending. My character died a lot quicker than I wanted them to. Yes. So Ariana, how do you prepare to go into November 1st, ready to write? It's a complicated process. Step one, Pinterest. I find all of the names of the characters I want and then I get all of the cute little photo edits with the names on them and then I save everything to the little Pinterest boards. So I'll have animals, foods I want. I really emphasize the foods because I feel like food is an underrated part of the narrative, like the sensory element of it. Does this make me get my finger? Yes. I want all the setting stuff and then I will try to get character poses and stuff like that so you know those little sketches that you get and like, "Well, draw your character in this style." I don't draw, but I do get in there and I'm like, "I want my characters to look like this in a scene and they'll just give me ideas because you can just impose whatever's in your head on these little figurines, right?" So I've got all of my Pinterest boards and then I have the Google slides. It used to be the one that was just on the computer. Now I use the one that's actually in your browser because I can put it on my phone too. I will have a sheet on each slide that will describe a character, the tropes associated with said character. I want to know tropes that are going to like come out and bite this character at some point. I want to know their astrology. I want to know their Myers-Briggs personality type. I want to know their enneagram with a wing. I want to know all of the things because I feel that like these character profiles together build a person. You might not get one person out of the description of an INFP, but if you know that this is an INFP 4-wing 5 who happens to be an Aries Pisces cusp, then you've got a person, right? It gives you multiple... Have you ever thought of going to study criminology and being like a behavior criminologist or something? That sounds like too much time away from writing. Once I have all of these things, I will go in and I will start my outline. Now my outline is going to be very much just a bunch of lists. Every chapter is a list and it has to be an order for now. And then what I'll do is I'll show cause an effect because it's all just one spreadsheet, right? So this list goes scene 5 back here or then chapter 20 is a callback, you know, because I have that thing there and I want to emphasize it and I put it over there and I copy it, nice. And so then you just have everything feeding into itself and by the time you've done like a whole day's worth of this, you've got 40 chapters. And then you have a button? I'm so glad you didn't do it. You just have to go through it. It happened in the day. That will take me like four years. Like what? I love hearing this because I'm not, I'm not a Sarah, but I'm not an Ariana either. I think I'm a faintsitter for this scenario. I'm Switzerland because I do plan, but I don't plan. I didn't really do not plan as in depth as you do Ariana. I like sticky notes. That is my good too. Like I stick in like the hic out of my wall, I don't need paint, I have sticky notes. I would have these sticky notes and to be like blue eyes. Maybe this is the hair color. This is what they like to do. But that kind of comes as I'm writing the story because they'll put up waking up and I'm like, wait a minute, does she drink coffee or tea, I'm gonna go with tea? So I'm loving this like vibes between the two of you. I'm like, whoo, that's polar opposites. Yes. That's why, you know, we have some good insights into each other's work. In my Pinterest board, I will have just images of actors or models who have the look of the character I want. Maybe they'll be posed a certain way. And I'll just stare at this person, analyze the facial features, get the micro expressions and then I excavate them and I pull them out and I put them back in. Girl, girl, you know what I have done? I've literally, if I'm writing a novel and I always have a specific person in mind for my novel, I will put them as my screensaver for my computer. So every time that I open up, I'm like, I see you. When I was writing my first two books of regrowth and refinement, one of my main flagship series, I actually had a picture of a model that looked like the main character to me as the phone wallpaper. And so it was like, every time I open my phone, it's like, you should be writing. The interesting part about this to me is that even though I'm a discovery writer and as I write, my character tells me these things, I don't plan it before I write. But at the time I'm done with the novel, I have spreadsheets of stuff that detail them. I don't use Pinterest like Ariana does because I'm old and I'm like, you're old when you're maybe 80, okay? Okay. I'm only halfway old then, but I do like to go make that first draft, go into a second draft that looks like I knew what I was doing from the beginning when I had no clue what I was doing. Then in your process is right to do your in-depth plotting, because eventually you have to make sure that that plot is continuous and you have all those bits in it. For me, that's between one and two for Ariana. That's pre one, it's halfway through one. I will stick like a rough outline of a scene, like smack dab in the middle of my list outline and then build out from there. You have written a whole chapter and everything around it is a checklist. You don't necessarily write in the order that you made the checklist you talked about. You'll jump around in it for whatever you're spreading. Whatever's interesting in the moment, I'm really excited to get to this point, right? I'll just go write that thing. I know what to go back to later. I love that you say that because, again, things that are over here, I have to know how it begins, what's the middle and what's the end and then I know the climatic points inside my story. I generally know how the novel, what scene it starts with, but for the love of me, I cannot. I cannot write out of order. What would happen is I would be writing and then I'm like, I don't want to write this because it's torturous. I want to write the next scene and so then I force myself to sit there and write the scene I don't want to write just because I want to get to the next scene, which I feel is like a good thing. It's like a reward that I give myself. Right, right. Even the fun part. I'm kind of in between that because I will start writing at the beginning, but as I'm going, if I'm doing dishes, I'm like, this will make a great scene later in the book. I will go and I will write that later and then be like, I'll figure out a way to connect them. So in my giant Google slides, I will actually have slides that describe a particular scene if I don't know where it goes. So if it's like its own slide, I'll put it in a section that says scenes that I don't know where they go yet. That was cool. I work with sticky notes. So I would be writing, this is what I want to happen in the scene and it goes like slap against the wall. And I'm like, really? You go. I'm like, do you fit in here? No. That's too early. Do you fit it? No. That's too. I will put you on this side over here. I will get to you. Because as you've heard about all of these different things, which one feels good to you and where do you want to get started? If you fail your first nano, nobody's going to be upset. But have you learned through that nano? Was over plotting was that too much? Do I need to roll it back next time or do I need to plump more because it just wasn't enough? That's what you're learning as you're doing nano, Raimo. You're learning how your processes work to be able to write every day. Do either of you have anything we haven't talked about, plotting and preparing your novel that you'd like to add? Put pictures in your outline. It's really great. And you look at an image and you go, oh, I want that feeling right now. And you can even have your outline for one chapter, be multiple pictures. I really love that. What pictures are in my head? So I'm just like, let's just keep them in there. They're pretty fun out there. I'm currently writing suspense romance. And I printed pictures of the apartments that didn't even. And I printed pictures of what I want inside because she's like a makeup artist. So I wanted to have her salon in a specific manner. So I printed that out. So every time that I write a scene in there, I can look at the picture and I'm like, ah, she's going to sit there. She's going to do that. I do see the benefits in doing that. And I'm going to try it. I will. It's always the twisted road we walk down. Thank you for joining us today, Ariana. It has been so fun hearing your perspective and hearing your processes. And we appreciate you very much. All right. Good times. We like to keep it short here on TV and Tails. Get those fingers back on the keyboard and your pens back on paper. If you want to be a part of this lovely community that we have created and want to see all the behind the scenes of Lee singing and Sarah eating chips, please go and follow us on Instagram and Facebook @tntailspodcast and on Twitter slash X and tick tock at podcast details and go to that purple icon on your device. It is Apple podcast. Go give us five stars and tell us what your favorite writing method is, what writing method would you like to incorporate or what you would like to use when you bid in an environment. We do have our next slot me with a wet fish episode coming up. So start dropping in the comments and author or a novel that you wish more people knew about. Happy writing. Bye. [Music]
