NaNoFiMo Attacks!

Well, gang, November has struck, and it’s writin’ time!

I present you with a quote from my dear friend Jeff, who happens to also run Sofawolf Press, and his encouragement on the subject ‘o Nanowrimo.

REAL writers do one thing (they do a lot of things, actually, but for the sake of this discussion just one) — they write. It doesn’t matter HOW they write or how OFTEN (other than, for most you have to write a lot to get good at it) or WHERE. They just do it.

The ones that force themselves to write a little bit each day? Yeah that is admirable. And most of them will tell you that 50% of the time they go back the next day and delete almost everything they wrote the day before because it was forced and their heart wasn’t in it. But they still DID it, and at the end of the process they have a bunch of words that may become a book someday with care and editing and rewriting. And so does the person who pounded it all out in a month. The latter may require a little more work to get into shape by the time it is done (or it may not, this is where the natural skill comes into play), but it is done. And nothing EVER gets the recognition it deserves, deathless or not, until it gets DONE first.

We get plenty of things submitted that “started out as my NNWM project” and lots of them are great. We get plenty of things that are NOT, granted — but that is true whether or not the material had its genesis in NNWM. It matters a whole lot more what you do with the stuff you write in that month AFTER that month — like NaNoFiMo or NaNoEditMo(s) — than what you did during that month.

So as a publisher we encourage everyone who can do it to do it. (I would do it, if I had any time for writing anymore, just to have done it.) When you are done you may have something that looks like a novel which you can then start editing until it IS a novel. Or, you may have a fumbling bunch of pages that may have 2-3 beginnings of novels in them, all disharmonious and lumped together, which you can then do a NaNoFiMo on next year. Or you may even end up with nothing, other than a lot of practice and a sense of accomplishment that you DID SOMETHING HARD. That’s no bad thing in its own right.

So there. Go forth and make wordcount!

Me, I am apparently spending this NaNoFiMo working on Armadillo Wizard (which I added 4K to last week) and Slate. I had hoped to finish the Thing With The Goblins, but Slate kinda sucked me in. May still get to it, but not sure.

If I can make the 50K wordcount—which is only 2500 words five days a week, and not that bad a goal—I’ll be happy.  Ideally that will be split with at least 10K on Armadillo Wizard and another hunk on Slate, with perhaps some other words thrown onto other projects (House With Bird Feet, say.)

Even if I fail to make the wordcount (which is certainly possible) but I still manage to finish one of the big lurking projects, I will be delirious with joy.

The big roadblocks are that I’m going to be on a roadtrip next week, Tuesday-through-Friday, and then upon getting home, I have to immediately tear up the downstairs carpet for the flooring guys to come in and lay laminate. So I expect to find myself at a word deficit pretty damn quickly, but eh, them’s the breaks. Nothing that can’t be made up by sitting in the coffee shop with a bag of espresso hooked to the vein.

Wordcount: 2700

2 thoughts on “NaNoFiMo Attacks!

  1. Owlor says:

    I won’t be able to participate this year, cus I’m way too busy writing My Little Pony fanfics to start a new writing project. I’m guessing I should try my own version of NaNoFiMo, If I could just get Applejack to shut up and become a sky pirate already. (it makes sense in context… kinda.)

Leave a Reply