NaNoWriMo, how about that book cover...

With me essentialy being a discovery writer, also described as "seat of my pants" writer (in short, a pantser), or a gardener (as opposed to, respectively, an outliner, a planner, or an architect), I'm not entirely sure how I should prepare for the upcoming month.

As I told you last time, I made an inspirational booklet and downloaded Scrivener. Since then I also adapted the highschool workbook for the young writers into a Traveler's Notebook format, so my daughter could take it with her in her TN. That took some time, but was fun to do. They are nice to read and use even if you're not in high school. I made it available in my dropbox folder (you can find the link to the dropbox on my Midori TN free inserts page).

I played a little with Scrivener and, to be honest, I am impressed, so I'm keeping it. Watched some video's about outlining and prepping for NaNoWriMo (for instance Kaytastic's channel for the writing point of view and Ellen Brock's channel for the editor's point of view) and tried to implement some outlining by making chapters and character sheets in Scrivener (some great ones for Scrivener you can find here on Caroline Norrington's site). After which I came to a full stop.

NaNoWriMo prep for 2014

Joining the NaNoWriMo fun again this year and this time I decided to come prepared to the battlefield, so that, by the time november first comes along, I can hit the road running...

Now I'm not sure if I'm going to accomplish that, but I am at least going to give it a shot.

First of all I felt I needed a notebook, since NaNoWriMo is writing, ergo pen and paper...

So I designed an inspirational booklet to accompany me throughout the month, for notes, for inspiration, for wordcounts and journaling about anything NaNo related (or not...). I made the booklet freely available via my dropbox (the link to which you can find here).

Double threading elastic for your Traveler's Notebook

Since I started making Traveler's Notebooks I have tried out several different ways to thread the elastic through the spine to keep the notebooks inside.

Obviously I started with the normal method, which is one thread, this is realy plenty to keep the notebooks in place.

However I got so many requests to put two elastics in the spine, that I started trying out different ways to thread the elastic. I looked around for ways other people were threading their Traveler's Notebooks and found several, but none of them really appealed to me. 

The first and easiest way I found would be the sideways threading, as opposed to the regular vertical threading. This seems very nice in the beginning, but has a tendency to deform the spine, so that wasn't going to work for me.