chronicled & illustrated

Just returned from three weeks in Houston visiting family and friends and attending my husband’s high school reunion. What a wonderfully relaxing time we had!

But after a day back, it’s time to start National Novel Writing Month. It’s already 1 PM, I haven’t even thought about starting yet, and I have an evening out tonight.

Looks like a rough start to the month.

Let me interview myself about it.

Are you ready?

Not even close.

Do you have a plot?

No. I do however have well-developed characters and a setting. This is the only way I could tackle this with any hope of finding a plot. It will be the third in what has just become a series I think of as “Harm’s Way.” Next year, I’m screwed because I won’t write four of ‘em. See the sidebar for details on the others.

Do you ever finish your Nanovels?

Of course. Occasionally. Once.

Do you have a stack of unfinished novels?

Yes. But I don’t think of that as a negative at all. How many people can say that? I’d guess about 1% of the people who say they’d like to write a novel. NaNoWriMo is not only fun and something to concentrate on in November which is my least favorite time of the year and a month when I used to tend toward depression but also is a great way to learn what it takes to actually finish a lengthy piece of writing. All of the novels I’ve started in NaNoWriMo are, I feel, worthy of revisiting and working on. I just haven’t gotten to all of them yet.

If you already have a stack of unfinished work, why do I keep doing it?

Because within the month of November, I never know what’s going to happen. It’s like stepping off a cliff without the landing. If I decided not to do it, I would wonder later what I might have written if I had done it. This way, good or bad, fun or gruesome, at the end of the month I have a large block of writing I’ve accomplished that would otherwise not have been written. I give National Novel Writing Month and Chris Baty full credit for my having gotten this far in my writing career. Much more so than any writing teacher or mentor I ever had…and I had some good ones.

Are you going to get your requisite 1667 words done today?

Highly unlikely unless I count this blog post.

Got to go!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 12:18 pm and is filed under NaNoWriMo, fiction, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.