To NaNo or not to NaNo?
Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Friday, October 29, 2010
Monday is the start of National Write A Novel Month. It's a great idea in concept, and I'm certainly not against the idea of getting some serious BIC time.
I thought hard about participating this year, but at this point I don't have the stuff together to get seriously started on a work of novel length. NaNoWriMo (as it's called) rules call for starting a new novel. Sure, you can do lots of prep work, outline the thing, get your characters together, and so on. However, setting a formal goal of X words in a month just doesn't work for me - unless there's a real deadline involved.
I've tried to do this a couple of times and utterly failed each time. I think I hit about 15K words. The first time - early in the month - an elderly relative fell and we had to drop darn near everything to help. Sorry, but that comes first. The second time - about mid-month - I got hit with a very nasty virus. Oh yes, I'd had the flu shot. But this wasn't the flu. I was flat out and medicated for about a week. No writing for me. In years past I've done better by simply redoubling efforts on works in progress. And you know what? That works quite well. And if I manage 50K words on an existing project, I won't complain. It's against the spirit of NaNoWriMo, so I won't enter.
Perhaps what I should do is challenge myself to post word counts.I'll give some thought to what I can do to mix up my November writing routine.
If you're doing the NaNoWriMo thing, all the best. As I said, anything that helps with the BIC time is a good thing.
Tags: Writing
Filed under: Writing
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