November is National Novel Writing Month, called in the biz NaNoWriMo, or simply NaNo. The objective is to write the complete first draft of a 50,000 word novel (or 50,000 words of a longer novel) in the 30 days of November.
NaNoWriMo is nuts—and I would totally do it if I had the time!
1,667 words a day. Every day. For 30 days. It’s not really that hard if that’s your ONLY job. In fact, if it’s your ONLY job, you probably should be writing more than that every day when in the first draft phase.
But since I have a 2-year-old, writing is not my only job. I set my goal a little bit lower—to finish revising a first draft of 35,000ish words into a strong second draft. I’ve been doing quite well, I am happy to say. I’m about 20 pages/8 scenes from the end. I’m very pleased with it so far.
I am also pleased with my writing discipline this month. I haven’t been able to create any more time in my schedule, but I have clamped down hard on spending what time I do have writing. I have severely limited my social networking/Internet time, ignored my email, and pretended that Spider Solitaire does not exist. All the things I often allow to intrude “just for a moment” I tried to shut out. I am very happy with the productivity I have managed to find this month.
And I seem to have been infected with the NaNo bug, because the past few days I decided to actually keep track of my word count for the day:
Sunday: 1,600
Monday: 2,250
Tuesday: 1,140
Wednesday: 1,173
Wow. That’s a lot. An average of 1,541 per day.
Hmm. That’s not that far from 1,667 per day…
If you’re doing NaNo for real, how are you holding up?
November 1st: The Most Wonderful Date of the Year
And no, it has nothing to do with NaNoWri Mo. I have never done National Novel Writing Month in November, although I would like to at least once in my life. This year will not be the year, however.
No, I love November 1st because that means October is over! The last 10 days of October are a whirlwind for me: parents’ anniversary, my anniversary, my daughter’s birthday, then Halloween and all the concurrent festivals and festivities. For an introvert like myself, that’s a lot of socializing in a short amount of time. It’s also quite a bit of planning and errand running to pull off the birthday and Halloween so close together.
So when November 1st dawns, I take a deep breath and revel in the sudden silence of my social calendar. Not that November won’t be busy—I am the mom of an elementary school child, a working author, and there’s that whole Thanksgiving thing—but the month goes back to the normal level of crazy.
Although I am not doing NaNoWriMo, I plan on doing NaNoEdMo—National Novel Editing Month. I got my latest manuscript back from my editor in August, and didn’t get to look at it until October. So now I intend to buckle down and finish the revisions this month. By the end of November, I want to have a shiny manuscript ready to be sent out to agents.
Then I can spend December compiling my list of agents, readying the materials needed to send to them (query, synopsis of varying lengths), and be ready for a query storm in the New Year.
So now that I can breathe, that is my plan for the month. We shall see how well my plans pan out, since we all know how often life derails our plans!
What are you doing for November?