31 October 2016

I went back and forth on whether to do NaNo this year (it starts tomorrow!)...I know I can do 50,000 words in a month; if you add up all the things I work on, I easily do 3 times that on an average month. It feels a little bit like cheating, when the purpose is to create a daily writing habit that I already have.

But...I'm doing it anyway, and using it to make myself sit my ass down and get the vomit draft of the third book in the Wick Chronicles done. This time of year it's too easy to get distracted, and it's too easy to make excuses--holiday shopping, and I have the second book to finish revisions on, which need to be done soon else the Wicked Witch of the East sets me on fire right before Thanksgiving--so having a goal of earning that shiny PDF certificate might be enough to keep me working.

I'll be writing around work yet to be done on final draft revisions for Ozoo (working title, though it seems to be sticking), so the Spouse Thingy has been warned: he's going to get a lot of shop time in November, because I'll have my face glues to notebooks and computers. This disappoints him greatly, as I'm sure you can imagine...being forced to go play in his workshop where he gets to create pens and bottle openers and clocks. I'm a cruel taskmaster.

Starbucks may need to give me my own table. I know I'll be spending a lot more time (and $) there.

A few days ago, I had a discussion online with a couple of people who want to give it a try, but are overwhelmed by the idea. Fifty thousand words seems like a lot. Writing an entire novel in a months seems like a lot. How can anyone even do it?

Here's the thing: 50,000 words does not a novel make. If you stop at 50K, you've got a novella (which is a lovely thing to write, and if you can do it, more power to you. I'm far too verbose) and even then, you're really not done. At the end of the month, whether you have 50,000 or 60,000 or 100,000+ words, what you have is, at best, the first draft. What I'll end up with is a vomit draft--called so because I pretty much vomit the words out and don't go back and edit anything. I just write. I write until I'm done, and then I go back and eviscerate the whole thing.

That's what you want to do for NaNoWriMo: write without editing. Let the story pour out, see where it goes, and while you're at it, create the habit of sitting down for a couple of hours a day and writing.

It's under 1700 words a day.

You really can do it.

No, you won't have a publishable manuscript, and that's just fine (and if you do, I bow to you.) But you will have written a book, and it will be a giant piece of YOU, and it's awesome (and scary and nerve-wracking and amazing.) It's also just flat out fun.

Don't let the nay-sayers--and there are those who look down their thin, long, pointy noses at the entire concept--push you away from it.

There's a book inside you.

Let it out.