NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo (pronounced nay-no-rye-moe) is taking place right now! November 1st through November 30th finds over 100,000 people frantically trying to fill roughly 175 blank pages with 50,000 words. I am one of them.

I decided to write a book. Several of you have been fearless in your encouragement of this endeavor, and I appreciate your sentiments. I am still very unsure of how this will play itself out, but for better or worse I am committed to writing 50,000 words over the coarse of 30 days. The basic rules are as follows:

-No writing can take place outside of 11/1 to 11/30 except plot outlines, or character sketches. I chose to do away with this acceptable medium of novel insurance, and simply jumped in with both feet last Sunday night.

-The book has to be an original piece of fiction, and can not be a left-over project from a previously unsuccessful NaNoWriMo year. Since this is my first year participating in NaNoWriMo, and certainly my first attempt at writing a book, this rule doesn't apply to me. However, should my grasp of sanity prove too tenuous I have a lovely piece of plagiarism I am prepared to enter under my own name. Did I just write that out loud?

-The book must include 50,000 words (per the official NaNoWriMo word counter) by midnight, local time, November 30th. It can not be the same word written 50,000 times. I checked. So far I have 14,720, but I am fairly certain only 7 of them will last past the first edit.

The last point NaNoWriMo makes is that this project is purposely about the pursuit of the Frantic Novel. In order to complete a novel of this length, in this amount of time, you can't expect perfection. In fact, quite frankly, you can't really expect much at all - except a high word count. So don't think you are getting a copy of my Newberry Medal earning novel on December 1st. However, I have decided to take the book, when complete, through an editing process and see if anything sticks.

So, wish me well! You may send sustenance to my family, since they will be without a mother/ cooker/ nurse/ laundress/ wife/ home manager/ maid for the remaining 3 weeks.