NaNoWriMo: The Road So Far… For Those That Give a Shit About Such Things

 

So, it’s day 7. One week into NaNoWriMo, which I swore I’d never do again because I hate typing NaNoWriMo so much it actually makes me scowl as I do it. But here I am. In it again. LUCKY was my first NaNoWriMo project, and look what happened there. Publisher.  Exciting and all that. So if I didn’t do it this year, it would’ve been unlucky. Heh .UnLUCKY. Get it? Okay, moving on.

Over the summer, I fell into a trap where I wasn’t writing every day. I wrote articles, yeah, and blog posts, but not fiction. Not writing fiction made my stomach feel funny, in a bad way, and I dreamed stories and characters constantly, but making the time to just sit down and write? It didn’t happen.

Now, as I cross the 20K word mark during the first week of NaNoWriMo, I’m kicking myself for being such an asshole procrastinator. I could have had the first three or four books in the FLOG (For the Love of Gods) series drafted. What was I thinking? What’s wrong with me?

Oh, right. Life.

The thing about NaNoWriMo is it gives us permission to set everything else aside. We feel like it’s okay, because we’re working toward something everyone will know about. We’ll achieve a goal and get a nice, shiny virtual medal for it. Then we can say, “Hey, I know my toilets are growing hair, but look what I did!” So folks won’t say you’re lazy and shit, right? Of course.

I can write a lot of words. The article writing has helped increase my typing skills, so I can type as fast as I’m thinking. Well almost as fast. Jesus, I’d be a freak if I could type my thoughts at the same speed they occur. Anyway, 2000 words is nothing. A couple of hours of work. I’m not bragging. It’s rough work. Sometimes it’s horrible work I wish no one had to see, but still, I can pump out 2000 words really fast. This year I joined WattPad, mostly because they’re offering a prize for NaNoWriMo participants who post their stories. But when I read about the contest, I was all, “Hey, how cool would it be for readers to see that books don’t just fall out of our heads ready to read? It’d be a learning experience to actually see why it takes authors so long to release each book, particularly if they don’t have a backlist of titles before they publish.”

So OBAMANATION is going live as I write each day’s words, chapter by awful chapter. The finished product (after editing and rewriting) will be way different than what’s up there now. Everyone gets to see my constant war with punctuation, and how, if someone’s talking to me as I write, bits of the conversation get into the manuscript. Words, sentences, thoughts; just smack in the middle of a scene. It’s insane. I try to catch it, but I’m sure the parts that are live right now have random shit here and there.

The other interesting thing I’ve realized is I tend to add scenes and chapters as I work. Constantly. So I might write five chapters non-stop, and then one day I’ll realize I should have had this person do that thing first, or a character pops up, and I have to add a scene after Chapter 2 to bring them in. This has happened with OBAMANATION. Chapter 3 is totally new. Last night I dreamed about the damn thing, and was all “Oh…the reader needs to see what’s happening from the American’s end. Also, I think Andy needs a love interest, but she’ll be with Jamie first. Oooh…add a chapter.”

So I did. Her name’s Veronica. Yes, she’s much like “my” Veronica, only Canadian, because I know she’d make an awesome character.

Anyway, that’s the road so far. If I keep up at the rate I’ve been going this first week, I should finish by next weekend. Not the novel, but the first 50K words. Yes, I’m impressed with me too. Now there’s no excuse for me to put off the WIPs I’ve got outlined. We all know I’ll make excuses anyway, but we’ll all know it’s a lie when I make them now too.

Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo? How’s it going? If you don’t do NaNoWriMo, but want to motivate yourself, create your own NaNoWriMo month. Make a goal to finish say, half a novel and get to it.

Tagged: insanity, Lucky, NaNoWriMo, Obamanation, procrastination, writing