Friday, November 1, 2013

NaNoWriMo 2013 Kickoff

50,000 words in 30 days. Fifty-Thousand words!!!! In THIRTY days! That's a hard thing to type without throwing in some expletives. It makes me want to go all Sam L. Jackson.

November is National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo if you need a short form that makes people look at you funny). The deal is, you have to write 50,000 new words (minimum length for a work to be considered a "novel") within the confines of the month of November. I've "won" 2 years in a row and I intend to win a 3rd, so I'm going to be sticking my little NaNo progress tracker over at the right and updating it as I go.

This year has some significance in that I'm starting a new project AFTER completing a full novel. So I'm writing something completely fresh that's really only been bouncing around in my brain-pan for a few months. It's going to suck! And that's OK because first drafts always do for me.

You see... I'm somewhat terrified by the whole "starting from scratch" thing. Sure, I have an outline (a very light one) and characters (the core at least), but I both LOVE and HATE this part of writing. The blank page. The uncertain future of the story. It fills me with quickly alternating (almost to the point of oscillation) high levels of excitement and dread.

I can do ANYTHING with this story! What if I SCREW it up? This idea is so AWESOME! What is it DERIVATIVE of? Oh I've got this FANTASTIC twist. How the HELL am  I going to pull it off?

Truth be told, to begin to even quiet those feelings (they NEVER go away) I need something to work with. I've found my comfort zone, and it's much closer to the revision end of the spectrum than the writing end.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE telling stories and making things up. Plotting, characters, worlds, I love all of it. I just like telling them well (and I do hope I do).

So today I embark on NaNoWriMo 2013, with a story in my head and a knot in my stomach. What are YOU doing for your November?

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