This was originally posted November 21st, 2011, the first year I attempted to write 50,000 words during National Novel Writing Month. It is here mainly for historical purposes. I started late and didn’t get 50,000 words done that year, but have every year I’ve tried since then.
I am 10,000 words into my book now, oh… I didn’t mention my book before? I know, I haven’t mentioned it, sorry, but I had to open this post with something interesting. I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) event about halfway through November, which was kind of silly, since the goal of the event is for people to craft 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. Yes, that is 1,667 words a day, a somewhat challenging goal for anyone who is not a professional writer or seasoned veteran of journaling (my spell-check tells me that is not a word, but I know some of you do it). The idea is not so much to have a “finished” work by month’s end, but to have that pile of 50,000 words to mold and shape into something potentially publishable. The event is in its 13th year if I count correctly and has produced many published novels including Water for Elephants, a best-seller.
I am not so egotistical that I think that I will have a best seller (although that would be ultimately cool). I realize that probably 7,500 of those 10,000 words are either passively rendered, misspelled, repeated too often, or just bad prose, but I am plugging on in hopes that I can at least say I tried.
So, I am 10,000 words into my book/novel/whatever. I have pieces of several chapters, but no completed chapters. My goal for the end of the month, since there is no way I can achieve the 50,000 word goal of NaNoWriMo is to have at least once chapter completed with all scenes in place. As I am a complete beginner at this and have no real idea what I am doing, the book I am writing is constantly morphing. I see where I am overly descriptive and bog down in details. So I edit and move and cut and modify so that the novel fits my new mental framework for it each day. If I don’t finish the manuscript it will be because I never quit editing or I get so tired of editing that I finally give up the goal of writing a book. My attention span is not my strongest character attribute, so I hope that this project gives me a challenge and teaches me to stay with a task until it is complete.
No sneak previews of my book right now. I will tell you the (working) title is “Opposition” and it is a suspense, thriller, action novel (not sure how much of each will survive the edits) set in present time. Maybe I will post a snippet of one of the chapters in December. That is pretty dangerous to do since it could all change before/if it gets published!
So wish me luck on my book if you don’t mind. I will need it.