NaNaNaNaNaNo or Blo

So November seems to be a month for crazy people forgetting they have lives and setting themselves ridiculous challenges. Last year, along with a friend, I did NaBloWriMo where I studiously blogged every day in November. I remember the writing got very thin around the third week and there was even the odd evening where I was desperate for my bed, it was ten to midnight and I still dragged myself in to that freezing cold back room in the house we were renting in order to get some words down that day. We did have another friend who started with us but gave up far too easily (dig,dig)! So when my friend emailed me about doing it again - I completely ignored the email. Sorry. But I did give it due consideration (only I then never fed back to you).

The reason why I didn't immediately go "YEAY - count me in!" was because I was thinking about NaNoWriMo. This little cookie challenges the mentally unstable to write an entire novel in the month of November. 50,000 words in one month. And no - you are not allowed to write the same word 50,000 times. Variation in words is important. The idea is to get the words and ideas on the page - to go for quantity NOT quality. This is is very important for me because The Project (which is what I have erstwhile nicknamed my Work In Progress (or WIP)) has faltered so very often because I was looking for perfection in my first draft and kept editing as I went along. The upshot of this is that I have dumped (I think) five beginnings to my book. (The total trashed word count is somewhere around 80 or 90,000 over those 5 starts - a book's-worth in fact). Frankly they were crap and I am happy to have gone for the start I currently have, but that's not the point. The point is that the story, the plot and the characters have never progressed further than that point because I was too busy being picky. I am now desperate to finish it. NaNoWriMo essentially gives me permission to go past the dodgy bits so I can get the meat and two veg of the thing down. I can then go back and trim the fat and add the intricate and delicate sauces later.

Now my novel is for older teens (say 14+) and the main character is Poppy - hence the wordcounter in the sidebar is labelled Poppy's Progress (I have a habit of mistyping her name so unfortunately she may occasionally end up being Poopy - this has nothing to do with how I feel about her, it's purely because the 'O' and 'P' are next to each other on the keyboard). I am going for about 80,000 words at a maximum of which I have already written about 20K. For the mathematically slow if you that actually means that I've challenged myself to write 60,000 words this month.

BWAHA -HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHA! HA!

And to blog every day.


Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Absofragginlutely! But my goal is progress - getting past this hump and developing my story. Getting finished would just be the start - the real sweating will be in the editing but that will be another challenge again.

So there you have it. I haven't officially signed up for either. Being 20K in already is a bit of a cheat see and the blogging thing is just a ruse to keep me focussed on the novel thing. But I am psyched up and ready for it. I hope that you will tune in and cheer me on. I'd like to thank Natalie who is taking this month off from writing (seriously - that's going to be a big challenge for her - she's a writing cyborg) and who has kindly lent me her prolific Muse to shoo me along. And if you want to see how my blogging friends are doing in their efforts why not check out Aerin, Pete, Ello and Precie (who like me is doing her own version). Good luck to us.

We're all mad.