Sunday, November 19, 2006

I'm loving NanoWrimo...

Yes, it is true. It's been a tedious process, more so this year than last. It's weird because we had Hurricane Rita last year, and after being gone from my home for about three weeks and having to return to chaos, I managed to write 60,000 words in the month of November, starting Nano just a week or two after returning from the storm.

This year, I didn't want to just rush, rush, rush into writing. I wanted to pace myself. I did this because I had/have so much other stuff on my plate right now, and really, I haven't been on my "A" game on ANYTHING this semester; I chalk it up to post traumatic rita syndrome. We spent so much time dealing with the 'cane then rebuilding that we never got to breathe and realize, "Shit, we had a major hurricane!" Well, that's this semester for me. I spent all summer and up until the second week of November, watching the Weather Channel and checking the hurricane site online. I feared a new 'cane, and on top of that worry and teaching, I knew it would be hard for me to write.

Well, I'm happy to say that I am on track to hit my 50,000-word mark by the end of the month. Last night, I broke the 30,000-word mark. I've been diligently writing my 1,667 words a day; last night, I almost finished TODAY'S writing, so that's great.

This is a story I'm really interested in, a story that's different from any other story I've written, and I LOVE that, too.

I probably won't be "finished" the novel when November ends; in fact, I'll probably have 4 more chapters to write in December before it's complete, but all that matters is I'm writing and I'm meeting some interesting people all over the world, too.

If you haven't Nano'ed, you should definitely consider doing it next year! :-)


OH, btw, a new, AWESOME interview will be coming your way this week--be on the look out!

3 comments:

dsekou said...

yes, it's possible to write 100,000 words in a month's time , but what quality could the writing be ?

not making comment on your writing because although i haven't had the good fortune to read it yet , i'm sure it is very good , but i am commenting on the concept that 100,000 words can be rushed through in only a month's time without losing something in the quality department .

dsekou said...

oops m'bad . i stand corrected . someone told me it's only 50,000 words , but still, that's a lot to just tap out in a month

Shonell Bacon said...

It's a lot, but if you follow the old adage "Write everyday," you could conceivably write this much, if not MORE, in a month's time. I can't speak for everyone, but this isn't a WINGING thing for. I had been thinking about the story and characters for a few months, and then I wrote a very detailed outline of the story. The prewriting and prethinking of the work before NanoWrimo helps one write a book that's really not that bad. Grant it, the purpose of NanoWrimo is not to write a WONDERFUL book the first go out - most people need several stages of revisions to get a good, clean, interesting copy of their work completed. What this does is make people FOCUS on getting the writing out. Life has a way of taking time from this act, and NW is 30 days in which you are telling yourself, "I WILL get this done." I think that's a positive thing, :-)