NaNoWriMo!

I am SO EXCITED!

National Novel Writing Month starts tomorrow! I’m sure you know all of this already, but the goal is to crank out a 50,000 word novel in a single month. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done. It is an writing exercise! And it is hard!

You aren’t allowed to write anything until November 1st (which is about four and a half hours from now!) but you are allowed to plot and plan. I have spent a lot of time doing that lately and I am looking forward to getting started!

Realistically, I may not finish. I have only ever successfully hit the 50k mark twice, but this year I am really going to work my ass off. To succeed you have to write at least 1,667 a day. A DAY! That is a lot of words. Every. Day. But I am really looking forward to throwing myself into it.

Here is the novel synopsis I just posted on my NANO page:

The misanthropic and (hopefully!) madcap adventures of a team of bankers … unique bankers. The kind of bankers who travel the world quietly solving problems for the world’s largest financial institution and its most valuable clients. The kind of bankers who can overthrow a mid-sized country, make an oil spill disappear, or stop aliens from stealing the moon.

It will be half satire, half international espionage thriller, half love story and half exploration of all the ways in which banks are screwing you! It will also include notes on how to reprogram an Excel spreadsheet to sexually harass someone!

I will post my daily writing chunks on this here blog, so you can read it as I write it! And please yell at me if I slack off.

Some crazy people will be staying up until midnight to start jitting the keys at 12:01, but I shall not. I am kind of tired, so my very exciting Halloween plan tonight is to eat some real food for dinner, do some yoga, and go to bed early. I KNOW! I am so exciting that you can’t believe it!

Tomorrow this super-awesome adventure in awesomeness begins!


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NaNoWriMo!

Tomorrow is the 1st of November and some of you know what that means (because I have been droning on about it incessantly to anyone who will listen). That’s right; it is NaNoWriMo time once again.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writering Month. What does that mean? Is there some holiday or special Presidential declaration?

No.

There is nothing.

Except for the arduous and difficult and stressful and thankless (and did I say arduous already?) endeavor of writing a 50,000 word novel in a month.

That’s right, an entire novel in one month.

I have attempted it every year for years now and only actually succeeded once (though a second time I hit the word count in the allotted time but didn’t complete the novel appropriately).

There is no prize at the end and no real recognition and really no reason to subject one’s self to something like this other than blatant masochism. Well, there is also the love of the writing. The point of the entire thing is simply to stimulate writing.

The 50,000 words breaks down to 1,667 words each day. That is difficult. More difficult still to make all 1,667 of those words matter each day (though the general idea is that if you end up producing writing of any real quality, that is just an accident).

So tomorrow it will begin. I have no hope of being able to finish a whole novel in November, but I will give it my best. Also, I barely even have an idea what I’m going to be writing about. I have ideas, nebulous and blurry ideas.

I may not be doing a lot of blogging over the next month, but what I might try to do is post some of each day’s writing here.

I’m unreasonably excited about this. Wish me luck.


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