So you’re doing #NaNoWriMo again?

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Good one! You almost had me there.

Oh, you’re serious?

Do you hate yourself? Are you off your meds? Is your family so intolerable you’d rather suck blue light into your eyes like mother’s milk for nearly seventeen-hundred words a day, every day through November? It can’t be because you actually want to write fifty-thousand words in a month. That’s frikkin’ batty! And by batty, I mean torture. All of it. It’s the worst, for realsies.

No? You’re not looking to waste dedicate hours of you day, every-damn-day, or lose days off the end of your life from the stress, doubt, and self-loathing that comes with legitimately participating in National Novel Writing Month, but still want the blog badge and Twitter header image?

Now you’re talking sense.

Step into my office (I mean keep reading – office space is expensive), where you’ll learn how to win NaNo the easy way; to get all the shinies with almost no touching of your keyboard, fabricating a plan, or worry. In other words, to take your NaNoWriMo-Villain-Fu to DefCon mother-F-N one.

Yes, you should be excited.

HERE, THERE BE MONSTERS

For each of the last two NaNoWriMos, I wrote a guide to aid you in simplifying your journey to NaNo bad-ass-ery. Part 3 here is going to be different. Hang writing rules, we’re going deeper, villains. Like Cthulhu-sleeping-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean deep. Lemme explain…

You know how sometimes a villain is darkly funny, maybe a little bafoon-ish, and doesn’t come off all that threatening?

Then they shoot someone in the face or drop a plague and everyone’s like, “Whoa, that dude really is evil after all and not just some sexy, misunderstood eye candy who’ll see the light someday.”

Yeah, that’s how we rollin’ today, y’all. Daddy’s taking it up a notch (we call that ‘Escalation’), bumping from cutesy in Part 1 and charming in Part 2 (my post, my words, deal with it) of my The Villain’s Guide to Winning #NaNoWriMo series, to straight NaNoWriMo thug life here in Part 3, titled The Final Chapter (as you can see above in the, you know, title).

Forget writing shortcuts and word padding. Forget purple prose, adverbs, and characters doing nothing. Forget putting out any effort to attain that unicorn made of Resse’s Pieces and candy corn (screw you, I like candy corn) whatsoever called ‘winning Nano’ (and, be-tee-dubs, can we talk about how the real villain is the sociopath who came up with this “fun challenge”?) This year, I’m giving you the forbidden secrets – the don’t-open-that-book-or-the-world-will-be-cast-into-eternal-darkness shiznit. Lying, cheating, stealing is the path we’re going to walk; the one that’ll see you get that WINNER blog badge with barely any time spent in the Hell’s backed up toilet known as MS Word.

You’re damn right I’m on a roll.

And I do this all selflessly, my only reward knowing every time someone cheats at NaNo, a baby vampire gets its wings.

Shut up. Being funny in every sentence is hard.

So, on to it! Here begins the final phase of your infernal training, apprentice. Let us begin.

Infernal Training Lesson 1 – Copy -> Paste like a boss

Since the NaNoWriMo web site doesn’t validate your content, if you’ve managed to write anything at all (sucker), Copy and Paste that nonsense over and over and over. Do that until MS Word reports a word count of somewhere north of 50K. To make your life even easier, paste until you have twenty pages, CTRL+A (I don’t speak Mac, so if you’ve bitten the apple of self-damnation, you’ll have to figure it out yourself) and Copy -> Paste that. Take it up a notch by using the F4 key, which will repeat whatever you did last. That’s right, it’s a one-key Paste if Paste was the last thing you did. Lean your old iPod you still have in your desk’s top drawer for some reason on F4 and play Candy Crush while you crush (see what I did there?) NaNoWriMo like gangster supreme Darth Vader chokes disappointing underlings.

Infernal Training Lesson 2 – Filler text, otherwise known as ‘Easy Mode’

Did you know there are several ways to dump filler text into Word? Like, lots and lots of filler text? And that the NaNoWriMo site HAS. NO. IDEA. AND. GIVES. NO. EFs?

To fill your doc with instructional text about videos and pics and blah-blah-blah-no-one-cares, open a blank document and type =rand(x,y). Set ‘x’ equal to the number of paragraphs you want, and ‘y’ equal to the number of sentences per paragraph, then hit ENTER. BOOM, instant giant-ass word count.

To dump in gallons and gallons of Latin – which, not gonna lie, feels even more appropriately villain-y than stupid instructional nonsense – use =lorem(x,y) instead.

Finally, to add ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.’ (because Microsoft developers are insane three-year-olds) again and again and a-frikkin-gain, go with =rand.old(x,y). Yeah, I know.

All methods have a hard cap on what they’ll accept for the x and y values. For the largest word count, use =rand(1900,10) to generate around 31K words. Glorious! And you’re welcome.

Infernal Training 3 – The Grand Heresy

I saved this for last because it’s bad. I mean, they’re all bad, but this one is hella bad, the ultimate villainy. Just writing about it makes even my skin crawl, and coats my dark heart in a frost from which there may be no escape.

(And if people don’t get that these posts are satire, I’m gonna catch a monumental heap of crap. Suffer for your art, indeed.)

BUT, if sacrificing your immortal soul and probably losing all your friends and loved ones should your action become known are acceptable risks for you, hey, baller, go for it.

Here it is:

Use someone else’s work.

Be it from a writer who trusts you enough to send you a full MS for a beta read, a digital ARC you received through a contest or from a friend thrilled their book is about to be in the world, or any other source, slap a new name on the doc and a new title on page one, and paste that sucker into the NaNoWriMo site like your lazy brain birthed all those complex sentences and lovely phrases. This is by far the easiest and quickest option, and a true test of you black-heartedness and willingness to give in to the worst part of yourself to win. Tread lightly this path, for there is no coming back.

 

And there it is, the final installment of The Villains Guide to Winning #NaNoWriMo. I hope you’ve hated this write up (“villain”, remember?), and find no success along the dark path on which you’ve been set. But, meh. Whatevs.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

 

(DISCLAIMER – If you’re new to my particular brand of tongue-in-cheek-ery, you may think this guide is serious. Good. Keep thinking that. Bwa-HA-HA!)