NaNoWriMo

I see that, since returning from vacation, I wrote one post here, then left again for a month. I'd be embarrassed, but I did have my reasons. Well, one reason, anyway. I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. So for the entire month of November, I was writing a novel instead of doing the things I would normally be doing. Well, not all of the things I'd normally be doing. I'll post more about that later. In fact, missing a month has left me with a whole lot to tell you. And I do plan on catching up. So there will be several new posts here about what's been going on while I was away. But those ones can wait for a moment. This post is about my novel.

The title is Adventures of Xad Volume One: Worldweaver. It's an extremely cheesy science fiction book with spaceships and laser guns. I described it a couple of times as verging on "Flash Gordon" levels of cheesiness. In the end, I don't think that's quite true. But it really is a silly book. It's not the sort of thing I'd always wanted to write. But I had a month to write 50,000 words. I didn't want to get caught up in trying to go back and change things. I didn't want to worry that my project, my baby, was turning out awfully. I didn't want to say, "This is completely wrong. Why am I even doing this?" I wanted something that I wouldn't be too attached to, that I wouldn't have to take seriously. I didn't take any of my old ideas or abandoned projects. I didn't try to make it awesome. I just tried to meet the goal, and in the end, I did: it wasn't even close. By November 30th, the novel was 60,000 words.

Now, I know you're wondering when you'll have a chance to read it. Well, I'll try to make that happen, but it might take a while. NaNoWriMo isn't about getting to a completely polished, publishable work in one month. It's about writing a rough draft in a month. My novel needs some heavy editing. I made everything up as I went along. I don't think there are any major continuity errors, but some sections definitely need revising. I need to move events around and add to some portions that I feel are incomplete. If I find the time to do this, and I hope that I do, I won't be at all surprised if the final product is a lot longer. How much longer, I won't say. But for now, it's 60,000 words.

I recommend NaNoWriMo. I don't know if I'll do it again because I see now just how big of a commitment it is to actually finish. It's not the effort: it's the time. I mean, presumably you have to work. A project like this could suck up all your free time for a month. But it's also educational. I learned much about my own writing habits along the way. I sort of always thought of myself as a competent writer. I've read plenty of things, even by professionals, and thought, "I can write better than this." I don't think it's pure delusion. I have written things. Some of them really are better than what I've seen from certain purported professionals. But I've never written anything on the scale of a novel. Short stories, yes. Essays, of course. But a novel is an entirely different animal.

I thought I might get lost in it and not be able to continue the story. That I'd get stuck. It didn't happen. I thought I would probably be energetic about this in the first week, drop off and fail to write in the second week, try to play catch-up in the third week, and go for broke in the fourth week. That didn't happen either. In a way, I don't believe it. I always procrastinate. Or I used to. I practically planned to procrastinate. And instead, I wrote 2,000 words a day. There were a few busy days where I wasn't at my computer and caught up over the next day or so. But generally, it was a constant pace. This is the first time in my life that I can recall ever properly pacing myself in anything at all. It's sort of amazing.

I think I wrote good characters and a more-or-less coherent plot. The biggest deficiency in my rough draft is with the setting. In my mind, as I was coming up with things to write, I could envision the characters and the circumstances they found themselves in. But scenery was either not there until I needed it for the plot, or not important enough to write down. It's not that everything in my head happened on some blank, empty field. But I was thinking so much about the characters and the dialogue and the action that what a place looked like didn't seem important. Maybe it's me. One place is much the same as any other place to me. So that's something that needs work. But I know I can fix that with editing. I just wasn't focused on it while writing the rough draft.

So yeah, I've written a 60,000-word novel, by far the longest thing I've written so far. And that's why I haven't been updating this blog for a month. But I've been busy with some other things too. I'd tell you about them right now, but I have to go to work. So you'll just have to wait for my next post, whenever that is.