Well, I did it. Last week, I got my reminder notice in my e-mail, and I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year. For those of you who are not familiar with it, NaNoWriMo is an acronym for National Novel Writing Month.
What happens, is a bunch of crazies like us already-prolific bloggers sign up for this event, and during the month of November, we labor, sweat, keep bizarre waking hours, and tear our hair out trying to meet the prescribed deadline of writing 50,000 words in one month.
For a typical genre novel, that’s exactly half of a book, or two hundred pages of specially formatted manuscript pages. Word counts are done on the honor system, and they do have a way of counting the words you submit at the end of the month, if you claim you’ve met the 50,000 mark. They respect your privacy, and offer simple suggestions for encrypting your work, if you feel the need to do so—which is basically unneccesary.
But they trust you to be honest, and that what you submit is actually what you’ve written in November ONLY, and NOT including what you’ve written UP TO November.
The reward is more personal than it is anything else. You get a free T-shirt if you are a winner, and there are as many winners as there are people who succeed in writing 50,000 words. There are probably one or two other little advantages, like getting your name displayed somewhere on their website. But like I said, it’s really the personal reward of achieving a difficult goal that really drives people.
This event has been around for a few years now, but I didn’t learn about it until last year when someone people on a writing list had mentioned it in passing. Curious, I looked it up and decided to give it a try.
For those of us with full lives, writing 50,000 words in a month is a difficult task. I got up at 5:00 am every morning, enduring my husband’s ruffled feathers from my having invaded his personal pre-work solitude. But most mornings, I managed to drag my sorry ass out of bed, brew a pot of coffee, don my headphones and played my writing music via my Real Player.
I wrote a lot. I wrote more in one month than I ever had before. I’m a slow writer, you see. A procrastinator, a thinker, a muller. But last November, I really cranked. In those four weeks, I spewed forth 25,000 words, one quarter of my “new” novel. I was very proud of myself. I didn’t win the prize, but I surpassed my expectations, and set a new record for myself.
Unfortunately, due to burnout, life circumstance, what have you, I haven’t added to that word count, since. My romance is still languishing, begging to be fleshed out beyond the critical plot work I dedicated to it this summer. It's had a nice long vacation, and it's long overdue to get back to work.
So, when I signed up again on Friday, I thought I’d probably continue where I left off. Maybe this time, I’d meet the goal, and the hardest part of any novel, the middle, will have been completed. I just want to get this particular book out of the way, simply so I can say, I DID IT! I FINISHED A NOVEL!
But something happened to change all that.
Yesterday, my husband took our son for a father-son jog/hike a little ways down the road. He came back with an interesting piece of history to which we later found only a single sparse reference to on the Internet.
You see, back in the early 19th century, a local woman was killed on her way home from market. The few details he brought home (if you don't mind, I'll just keep that info between me and my greedy little writer's heart) made me wonder aloud if the place where this happened was haunted.
And then I said, That would make a good premise for a ghost story. And then I remembered a premise for another ghost story that’s been bubbling on the back burner for maybe the last ten years. And then I thought, Holy mackerel, I could combine them!
And then I thought, Maybe, just maybe, I’ll be starting a new novel when NaNoWriMo launches this year. That tired old romance can wait. I’ve got a good solid outline of the plot and can return to it another time, and lose nothing since it’s already lost momentum.
But this new story, well, really intrigues me, and I get excited thinking about it. It would be nice to use NaNoWriMo to get a big start on it, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get more than 25,000 words out of it, this year.
And maybe, just maybe, I'll have enough momentum left over at the end of November to finish it, too.
Time will tell...
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