Goodbye October! Hello NaNoWriMo!
Artwork by Daniel Danger whose work - which is gothically creepy and poignant - I absolutely love. One of his prints sits directly over my desk. I would love to have him design a book cover for me someday. Click image for his website.
Happy Halloween! I was sick this year, so for the second year in a row, no costume. Bummer. Next year I intend to make up for it big-time – I don't care where I'm living, I'm going to find a Halloween party and rock out!
October is my favourite month, so I'm always a little sad when it draws to a close. Happily, in recent years, the beginning of November has come with its own reason to get excited – NaNoWriMo! National Novel Writing Month has been around for over ten years now, and I've participated since 2006. The idea is pretty straightforward – participants sign up online, join some forums (usually a regional one and some others based on anything from writing genre to age) and attempt to write a novel of 50,000 words or more in the month of November. That works out to about 1700 words a day and a relatively short novel.
In recent years, NaNoWriMo has seen a steady annual increase in the number of participants, and as its popularity has grown, so too have opportunities to participate in person. In Halifax, I went to weekly write-ins at a downtown coffeeshop, which were always pretty fun. I'm going to try to go to some of the Victoria events this year. In my opinion, the best thing of all is the opportunity to participate in online forums. In the NaNoWriMo message boards you can find people willing to chat about virtually any writing-related topic. It's a great way to spend a dedicated chunk of virtual time with other writers around the world as they channel their creative juices.
I definitely don't look at NaNo as an opportunity to complete a fantastic, polished manuscript. It can, however, be a great motivator. If you start off the month with a plot and a game-plan (which I always do – I need an idea and a detailed road map before I can start putting words on paper) then the push you get from participating can really help keep your eyes on the prize. I'm a big believer in spitting out the first draft – not spending too much time thinking through every page, just getting it out onto paper and working from there. For a very long time I didn't look approach writing that way – I worried that if every sentence wasn't perfect, it wasn't worth moving on to the next one – but NaNoWriMo helped me realize that for me that approach is creatively crippling. Completing a rough draft first and worrying about the details afterwards works really well for me, and NaNoWriMo lends itself very well to that approach.
NaNoWriMo isn't for everyone – there's a lot of attention on word-count over quality, which can turn off some people. For me, though, it's a fun exercise and a great way to spend an otherwise gloomy month.
I wrote a lot of Way to Go during NaNoWriMo last year. This year, instead of starting a new project from scratch, my goal is to complete a full edit of another manuscript that I wrote earlier this year. I've been working really hard to get all my ducks in a row so that I can really focus my energies on giving that project a good solid polish. Today I finished cleaning up my most recent manuscript, which I'll be handing over to a friend for some feedback, and hopefully submitting* before the middle of November. I'm pretty stoked to have it off my plate right now, because I am very excited to get working on my NaNo project. I'm kind of superstitious when it comes to talking about "works in progress" but I will say that November is the perfect time of year to be working on this one.
I am also chomping at the bit to blurt out some really exciting news that I got recently, but I am under strict orders to keep it under wraps for the time being. I'm hoping to be able to reveal all within the next few weeks!
Till then, happy NaNo month!
* Submission is what the publishing world refers to sending manuscripts to publishers or agents for consideration. When I do submit my newest book, I'll blog about the process – how to know when you're ready to send it out, how to decide who to send it to, and how to write a query letter.
