So it’s now a month away from November. Which is when a young writer’s heart turns toward … NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month.
As recently as a few weeks ago, I was shaking my head sadly over the prospect. I’m still hip-deep in huge workload at the office, and life has been just way too stressful to even dream of doing NaNoWriMo.
And then the Muse started whispering in my ear …
Or something. Because I started thinking of my novel from last year. I hit my 50kwords, but didn’t finish the tale. But it’s within spitting distance of completion. And there’s a bunch of editing I know I want to do. And …
So i was thinking of doing all that for NaNoWriMo this year, with an eye toward finishing the month with (at a minimum) something polished enough I’d be happy to share with my friends. Even the writerly/literary ones.
Now, there’s no easy metric to use for that sort of thing. There are words before I’m done, but after that it’s just investing time. So I’ll have to figure out an “invested time as words spent” kind of a thing.
Is this actually less work than creating something new? Hell if I know. But it’d be nice to have the novel wrapped up.
Work to build speed?
That’s what I did last year. I had half a tale and desperately needed to finish it. In hindsight, I would have done better to start a new story. Now my beloved tale needs a LOT of work because there were days during NaNo when I was so uninspired that I had to write down whatever came to mind, good or bad. So this year, I’m starting a new story, one that I am not desperate to start or finish, just something I’d enjoy writing for a month. 🙂 Good luck with your project though! You might just make it work.