Sunday, September 26, 2010

NaNoWriMo 2010 and Current Work

This is a long one, so bear with me.

What is NaNoWriMo 2010? It is a contest. Sort of. It stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to, from November 1st to November 31st, write 50,000 words. Let me spell that out for you. Fifty. Thousand. Words. That's over 1000 a day. Every day. For a month. The Prize? There is no prize. Except for the fact that YOU WROTE A NOVEL. Here's the official website

I tried last year, failing miserably with a paltry 2481 words. I thought I could pull it off by writing off of this idea I had, just making it all up as I went along, following a premise that I hadn't fully worked out yet. It was awful. I made up characters on the fly and I only had a vague outline to work with. On top of that, my outline included a plot line I had not even attempted to flesh out. Needless to say, It was a train wreck of amateurishness. Defeated by my own style of "make it up as you go," I shelved the idea, wanting to get back to it after writing other things.