Up until last year, I'd never heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Last year, thanks to Facebook in particular and social networking in general, it was everywhere with its challenge to write 50,000 words in just one month. (That's roughly 1666 words a day if you don't have your calculator handy.) I can do 1666 words a day standing on my head. The tricky part is linking them together to get 50,000 words of a novel...
The idea is that you're supposed to start something new on November 1st and then emerge a month later with 50,000 words. Of course, 52,000 words is not quite a novel-length manuscript, but no one seems to quibble abut that.
I've decided to use the NaNoWriMo challenge as a spur to help me finish my novel Misbegotten. It's been sitting in a file on my hard drive for awhile now. I'm afraid if it stays there much longer it will never see the light of day. (Although, since some of its characters are vampires, that might be a good thing.)
There are widgets and applications that can help writers keep track of their word counts. Some of them are here. But I'm going to do it the old fashioned way. My friend novelist Christine Pope tells me to think of a novel being built one chapter, one short story at a time. I'm taking her advice to heart. I already have roughly 25,000 words of Misbegotten written. If all goes well, this time next month, I'll have 75,000 words. And that is a book.
Wish me luck...
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