Sunday, November 1, 2009

Time to Start that Novel – NaNoWriMo 2009


After much consideration I decided to attempt National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again this year. This means in the month of November I will write a novel. Sounds like a challenge, but I pulled it off last year with a solid first draft. Still haven’t gotten around to editing that puppy, but it did prove to me that power writing through a first draft is a great way to get things moving. And I need to get things moving.

Ever since I got the lovely little white box called the Wii, I’ve been slacking off. Now I can’t blame it all on that wonderful birthday present (thanks Chris!), it’s also the simple fact that I’ve been a lazy bastard. Sure I’ve done some short story polishing here and there, but nothing really came of it. The most writing I’ve been doing is this weekly blog and I’ve been slacking there a bit too.

So maybe NaNoWriMo is what I need. For those of you that are curious, I’ve got 30 days to write 50,000 words. That translates to roughly 175 pages. So really this is more of a novella sized work. Still this is a first draft and you can usually expect these kinds of things to change size after editing.

Last year I shot for 3,000 words each day I sat down and started working. 2008 had 5 weekends in it. This year I’ve only got 4. But I think the 3,000 word limit will work fine. This breaks down to me writing for four days a week till the end of the contest on the 30th which falls on a Monday.

I’ll be starting up tomorrow and I’ll also try and post some blogs with progress reports and some insight into what it’s like this time. I’ve already got a story idea and I’m eager to see where this one takes off too. I’ll go into a brief synopsis of the idea in my next blog.

Here’s the website if you wanna check it out: http://www.nanowrimo.org/


Have you attempted NaNoWriMo before? How did you fare? Sound interesting to you or do you think this is a hopeless task?

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