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National Novel Writing Month starts November 1st and I’m getting ready for it.

If you’ve ever thought about writing, November is the time to try it. NaNoWriMo is when a group of crazy people all over the world attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.

It’s intense, but it’s do-able. And it’s a lot of fun.

I have my idea and I’ve been making notes and doing some research. It turns out cockroaches are edible – a fact that I plan to make use of in the overpopulated future of my imagined Earth. I draw the line at tasting them myself to allow for realistic description though.

Still haven’t decided whether I want to write it in 1st or 3rd person though. And I need a good name for the group of bad guys. Hmmm….

I finished my 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month on Thursday night. I still had a few scenes to rough out to get to the end of the story but I finished that over the rest of the weekend.

I learned that if you just sit down and start, it’s not nearly as bad as you think. The hard part is starting – getting over the fear of trying something, and the fear that it won’t be nearly as good as you envision it in your mind. That fear can make cleaning the oven look good in comparision. But if it always stays in your mind, it will never become real. That’s true whether it’s writing or sculpture or jewelry or any creative endeaveor.

And making time when you don’t have much was difficult, but that’s true about anything.

I made my goal and I printed out the whole thing just so I could look at all the paper it took up Actually, I’ll use it for editing later on but I want to go back and finish my other story first. In the meantime, I’m not even going to reread what I wrote.

I have no idea how good or bad it is at this point, but I’m not sure that matters. What matters is that I did it. And that seems to matter a great deal.

I’m gradually getting used to the extra hours at work, and I’m just barely keeping up with the minimum word counts for NaNoWriMo. I’m at about 37000 words, and trying to get over a cold.

10+ hours straight at work, about 1.25 hours commute time, 8 hours of sleep, an hour to get ready in the morning… That leaves less than 4 hours out of the day for everything else – writing, eating, errands, spending a bit of time with my husband, etc. Forget housework – I certainly have

But I will not give up! I’m gonna make that stupid 50,000 words this month if I have to type in excerpts from the phone book.

I don’t think it would do much for my plot – especially since they don’t usually have phones in pseudo-medieval fantasy, but hey, it’s supposed to be the last refuge of the desperate. I’m not planning on sinking to that level though – unless it’s really, really necessary. Hmm, maybe a time portal opens and drops a phone booth back in time? Nope – that’s been done (see Bill & Ted)

And now back to my regularly scheduled story, where my heroine has just been accused of being a thief and threatened with having her hand cut off….

I’m halfway to the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words in a month – two days ahead of time!

Now I just need to keep that buffer. Things like grocery shopping and real life seem to eat away at it quickly. But I’m in good shape.

I really think I’m going to do it. I wasn’t sure I could when I first started this whole thing. I wanted to try – any words I had at the end of the month would be more than I had before.

As the Little Engine That Could said, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…”