NaNoWriMo

Yep. That's me. A winner.

To start with, I HATE the little abbreviation "NaNoWriMo." To me, something about it just stinks of the same nauseating pseudo-intellectualism that played a large part in driving me out of the English department in college and made it easier to change my major to something where everyone else didn't think they were God's gift to thought and the written word, and tried to prove this by wearing dark overcoats and divining sexual imagery out of the most innocuous pieces of writing outside of childrens' literature.

That might be my longest blog sentence to date. Maybe the grammar is a little caffeinated there. But anyway.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. I've been aware of this for years and thought it was kind of a cool idea: "Can you write an entire 50,000 word novel, from start to finish, all during the month of November?" Well, last year, my Life Coach got all fired up about trying to pull it off and talked me into giving it a try as well. So I pulled an idea out of the vault and hacked away at it, figuring that at the end of the month I'd at least have a workable first draft of another project already completed. And that's about all I did get out of it, but I did, in fact, pull it off. In 24 days instead of the available 30, I might add. And to give credit where it's due, Life Coach also finished hers. Quite a feat considering she'd never tried to write a book before.

So I bring this all up now because just in the past couple days, I've come across what this year's novel idea is going to be. But it's not November yet, and I am unfortunately inflexible when it comes to following rules, so I need to wait until we've crossed over from Halloween to Midnight, Nov. 1 to begin. And honestly it's really a struggle to do that because this story is coming alive right now. I mean, RIGHT. NOW. As we speak. I'm typing this while another part of my brain is processing the ideas I have so far and deciding what else I can do.

So, since I can't start yet I am preparing a little. Thinking it over, which I've always considered a bit part of writing anyway, that I can do. That's not cheating. I'll have the thing mapped out pretty thoroughly by the time I can start, but that's all the better. I'm also auditioning songs for the iTunes playlist that will serve as my writing soundtrack. This involves putting songs on the list I think will work, then listening to them in the context of the book's tone and voice, and then deciding to keep or delete them. Might seem like a time-waster to most, but pretty necessary for me.

So. If you don't see my on Facebook much in November, or, you know, out of my house beyond the hours of the school day, you'll know why.