Last year I just dived into NaNo head first with no plan in mind at all, I barely had a story to work from.  All I had was a vague idea and I just ran with it.  At ten thousand words I hit a huge brick wall, so I looked at how I started it and asked myself how my story got there, which gave me about another twenty thousand words.  All in all I got about thirty thousand written so this year I’d like to add at least ten thousand to that tally.  Now, I say that bearing in mind that NaNo may have to go on the back burner depending on how me and Owen are doing with Project Delphi.  Hopefully we’ll have Beta readers looking through Delphi while NaNo is on so we’ll be getting feedback at that time.  So I want to make sure that I have as much of the background details that I need before I start writing.  I’ve scribbled down some bullet point notes of interest, and I’m trying to write down how key points in the story will (Hopefully) go.  I need to do more though.  It’s a Science Fiction story, that is mostly set in space, so there’s little location scouting that can be done but there’s plenty more things that I can do.  That’s where I get stuck, I do not know what I’ll need to research until I start writing.  Although I am tempted to just write and fill in the details later and focus on the plot and the characters.  I’ve got to admit, I’m looking forward to NaNo this year 😉  There’s an excitement about the whole thing, NaNoWriMo that films with a little childhood excitement like that you find on a christmas morning.  I’m not deluding myself in the fact that I’m going to hit the fifty thousand goal.  I don’t think I’m good enough at the preparation work just yet and at the moment my natural writing length is about ten to fifteen thousand words.  That does not mean I’m going to slack off and make excuses left, right and centre.  The story I’m going to be writing is one that has been in mine (and Owen’s) heads for a long time. No Owen is not writing this one with me, at the moment, but come next year when I’ve sat on it and Owen has read it we’ll both get cracking on it.