Welcome to my third or fourth attempt at actually finishing NaNoWriMo.
National Novel Writing Month is a simple concept. You take a month (November) to write a novel. You have 30 days to write 50,000 words. The point isn’t to come up with a publishable manuscript, but rather to knock some words out quickly. This is roughly 1,700 words a day for a month. When the month is up you either have met your goal or not. It’s on an honor basis. There’s no real prize (though Literature & Latte generally offers a discount Scrivener code to those who complete NaNoWriMo).
It sounds simple enough (it is) and it seems easy enough (it’s not).
A couple of years ago I started a novel I called “A Tyranny of Towers” as a NaNoWriMo project. I failed spectacularly. I doubt I even really got going. That’s what usually happens to me. I miss a few early days and the word-debt piles up and seems too imposing. I often blamed November for my losses. This really is a bad month for this project —what with the holidays and all— so I decided to do my own project in my own month and took what I had a started fresh and set out to knock out 50,000 words in a month. I honestly don’t know if I managed to do so or not. I just don’t remember.
What I do remember is that I wrote three sections with a planned fourth then I hit a wall and set aside the manuscript for a year or so. I did come back and finished the last section for a total of 148,305 words. It just took me a bit longer than a month. So I have never “won” NaNoWriMo. This year I hope to actually get to the finish line.
My project this year will be a sequel to “A Tyranny of Towers” (which needs renamed first, since I managed to write a book with only a single tower mentioned in the whole book).
This site will serve as a way to keep me on track and for me to keep track of what I am writing. Wish me luck.
Christopher