Yesterday marked the beginning of National Novel Writing Month 2011. Who's excited!? I've participated in
NaNoWriMo four or five times in the past, but have never won (meaning I've never made it to 50,000 words). A couple of times I made it pretty far into a work, and a couple of times I pretty much failed flat-out, giving up early because November always seems to be such a busy month. This year, I'm breaking all the rules -- using the 50,000 word goal to motivate me to write all of the bits and pieces I've been meaning to work on in the past few months. That mainly means zine articles, but I'm also hoping to crank out a couple of short stories and guess what -- even this blog post counts toward my total because blogging more is one of my goals! How excellently meta.
(And if you're asking yourself how I'm able to write and blog at 11:00AM on a Wednesday, let me just say this: there are small benefits to just how sick being pregnant is making me. And I'm enjoying those silver linings while I can, because I hit the second trimester last weekend and am expecting the nausea, headaches and exhaustion to just vanish any time now. Aaaaany time now.)
A few months ago, I ran across my last decent-length NaNo attempt hiding in an old Livejournal. It's a little sci-fi in the beginning, and was meant to be an adventure through a kinda-sort post-apocalyptic only-there-was-no-apocalypse world for the rest of the story. It appears I made it 11,328 words in. I'll go ahead and post it
in a separate post for anyone who's interested. Looking at this untitled piece again makes me feel very tempted to continue the story. I remember vague settings and plot points -- it would have been fun. Even yesterday morning, as the wee hours of NaNoWriMo wore on, I considered dropping the whole "bits and pieces" idea and committing to an arbitrary, off-the-cuff novel. Honestly, though, I'm an outliner, and I would probably have been finishing up my outline around Thanksgiving. No, randomness will work out better for my fickle brain.
This year, I started my efforts with a David Morse fanzine. It's not complete yet, but it's getting there. I want to add some fun pictures and illustrations, but I'll probably save the layout for early December -- there's too much writing to be done! My biggest regret... or complication, anyway... is that I'd love to be doing some of my writing on one of my lovely typewriters, but that makes it more difficult to keep an accurate word count, and I can't attempt to sneakily validate the length of my "novel" at the end of the process. I'll probably use the typewriters some anyway, then type the same content into the computer to satisfy my OCD. I'll have to do the same thing with a notebook, so why not?
Alright, I'm off to (lie down till my neck stops hurting, then possibly) get back to work with Mr. Morse for a little while.
Good luck to all of the other NaNoWriMo participants! We can do it. Just don't take your fingers off the keyboard!
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