It's now just 9 days until NaNoWriMo begins for 2011. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month. The national part is a bit of a misnomer, since it's been international for a long time, but the rest of it is pretty self-explanatory - it involves writing a novel in a month, specifically in November.
I've been doing NaNo since back in 2003, when there were only around 25 thousand participants (now the numbers are about 10 times that), with varying degrees of success (or more accurately, varying degrees of failure).
In 2003 my project was a traditional fantasy called Inflight Entertainment (a working title based on the piece Inflight Entertainment by Graeme Koehne, which inspired the story). I reached a total of 14k words in November, which I never expanded on.
In 2005, I worked on Seeking Honour, Finding Destiny, a traditional/military fantasy. I wrote 25k words in November, which I later expanded to 43k words, but I haven't worked on it in a while (it was a decent story which I'd love to get back to, but I have a lot of other projects).
In 2006, I wrote Millennium Child, my first YA contemporary fantasy. I wrote 39k words in November, and finished the first draft of around 45k early the next year. The main reason I didn't finish in November is that I went away at the end of the month so I missed out on the final push - although if I had continued I bet I would have been pretty annoyed at reaching the end of the book 5k short of winning. I haven't done much with this story since I finished it, although revising it has been constantly on my todo list for almost 5 years.
In 2007, I worked on Reading the Rosaries, a contemporary fantasy. But balancing writing with full-time work and hard-core LOTRO playing didn't work out so well, and I gave up halfway through November with less than 5k words. Over the following few months I added another 3k to the word count, but balancing writing with full-time study and CFS worked out even less well, and I gave up on it.
Undiscouraged, in 2008 I started Subtle Magic, a traditional fantasy. I wrote 1 scene the first day before I realised the futility of the effort and dumped the whole thing.
By 2009 I was working on Blood Rails my How to Think Sideways project, but having learnt from the previous two years I didn't bother attempting NaNo. In 2010 I probably had the time for NaNo, but I didn't really have the motivation, and I was put off by more poor shows in 2007 and 2008.
This year, I was going to skip it again, not so much because of poor motivation, but because I've realised that starting yet another project when I have a pile of half-finished projects that I don't particularly hate is a bad idea.
But now I've decided to be a NaNoWriMo rebel and instead of writing a brand new book, try to finish the first draft of Blood Rails (since it's a YA and I have a tendency to write short in first draft, I'm not sure I have 50k left to write). Over the last week, I've tightened up my concept, resulting in a new Sentence ('An unloved daughter and a blood mage king must put aside the values they thought they believed in and join forces to save the people they care about most'), and a corresponding revised synopsis and line-per-scene outline. Next up is to look at some of the resources and tools available (which I'll talk about in my next post) and make a plan for November.
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