Hello. After the awesomeness of my September Writing Challenge, October was a bit more chill on the writing side of things. I met with my writing group to go over their feedback on one of my novels, and I’ve been working on rereading that novel and making my editorial notes before I dive into revisions. Mostly, though, I’ve been building up my writing energy reserves ahead of NaNoWriMo.
For those not in the know, NaNoWriMo stands for Nation Novel Writing Month. For the past twenty years, this non-profit has challenged writers to write 50,000 words in 30 days (the minimum length for a novel). That averages out to writing just under 2000 words a day every day, which isn’t typically a problem for me since, when I’m drafting, I average two to three thousand words a day with little difficulty. The problem I face tends to be going on a 7000-word writing binge and then finding myself burned out for a few days after. I find that NaNo helps me get back into a healthier writing pace if I’ve been over- or underwriting for a while.
I’ve participated in NaNo a couple times and find it to be either stressful or helpful, depending on the project and what life has thrown at me that year. I’ve used NaNo to pound out a draft of a story I was scared to write for a long time because I didn’t want to mess it up. I’ve used it to get a good start on projects I’ve been planning for a while. I’ve also started a NaNo project and abandoned it after a few days because I was too busy and/or not prepared enough to work on the particular project I’d pegged for that year. Last year, I only wrote 20,000 words during NaNo, but I was okay with that because I did a lot of traveling and spent the last week or so of November being completely jetlagged. This year, I’m hoping to use NaNo to expand a short story I wrote a while back into something longer. I’m also hoping to hit 50,000 words before November 28th because that’s when I fly back to the States, and the last few days of the month will be lost to the hell that is jetlag.
My goal is to get 50,000 words of prep and story written since I’m anticipating that this project will be closer to novella length than novel length. It’s a world I’ve been looking forward to exploring for a while and characters I’ve wanted to develop further, so I’m pretty excited about this project. Also, weirdly for me, it’s not an epic fantasy or a political intrigue which is what I typically write (though I’m not sure how true that is because the last novel I wrote was an action-adventure fantasy and a lot of my short stories lately have been either Sci-Fi or Magical Realism). Anyway, this story will be more paranormal/post-apocalyptic with a heavy dose of whimsy, some light horror, and a cast of three (I know only three, who am I and what did I do with Emily “Cast-of-thousands” Randolph-Epstein?).
I’ll try to do a couple update posts as November progresses so you can follow along with my progress. If you’re a writer and participating in NaNo this year and want to be my buddy, click here to add me.
Between NaNo, wedding planning, and traveling back to the States at the end of November, that’s my month booked.
Thanks for reading.
Leave a Reply