Let the Writing Begin!

"It was a dark and stormy night..."

Thursday marked the beginning of November, as well as the first day of the National Novel Writing Month: NaNoWriMo. What is NaNoWriMo? Well, here is the scoop straight from their website:

• National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
  
• Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
  
• Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
  
• In 2006, we had over 79,000 participants. Nearly 13,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

And, it's official...I'm participating this year. If you do the math, I have 30 days to write a 50K-word novel; that comes out to...let's see, 30 gozinta 50000...yikes! That's 1666.6666 words each and every day of the month of November. Or, look at it another way: 30 days to write a 175-page novel is "only" 5.83 pages each day. Since I have my Word document set to double-space, I guess I have to think 11.667 pages a day, huh?

So, how am I doing so far? Well, as of this evening (end of Day 2), my Word Count is (drum roll, please!): 3,054. That puts me within 279.33 words of goal! Whew.

And, you know what? I'm having fun with this! I've said for years that I wanted to write either a novel or a mystery or a biography...or possibly historical fiction. And, I'm one of those who can get bogged down in the "endless tweaking and editing" and forget to "just create." I need to be forced "to build without tearing down." So, here is a perfect opportunity for me to Just. Do. It.

Stay tuned...