NaNo Prep: It’s That Time of Year Again

This is one of my favorite times of the year. Halloween creepiness is everywhere, the weather is (some days) getting crisp and cool, and NaNo is ramping up once more.

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated, is the process of writing a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November. That’s about 1700 words a day, if you’re interested and not friendly with math. The whole point of it is to get people to write the novels they keep saying they want to write but never get around to actually writing.

If YOU are one of those, “Oh yeah, I’m going to write a book someday” people, I highly suggest checking it out. Yes, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer. Especially if you don’t consider yourself a writer.

I don’t really remember how I got into NaNo, but I remember diving in and falling utterly in love. This year marks my thirteenth year participating, and when I win, it will be Win #8. To me, it’s an opportunity to write whatever I want, risk free. I’ve written fanfiction, space operas (okay that was an accident, but still), mainstream lit, fantasy, scifi. Really, whatever I wanted to try. No one ever has to read anything I write, and if I truly hate it, it never has to be edited. It can rot in piece on my thumbdrive.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s always better to end the month with a document that looks, through careful editing, like it could one day grow up to be a proper novel. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. And because the breakneck pace doesn’t allow my inner editor to barge in and stomp all over the creative joy, I have not once in 13 years walked away from NaNo with nothing. Even in the years I didn’t win or hated what I wrote, there was always SOMETHING. Sometimes it was a character, or a plot I would go on to use elsewhere, sometimes it was something as simple as a kick ass name, but there is always something.

My own NaNo prep is simple:

1. I update my profile picture to something that makes me smile (#tbt to questionable child safety).
2. I decide what genre I want to play in this year (Humor! Mystery!).
3. I name my novel something snappy and cobble together a terrible cover (but always with a tasteful font).
4. I reread last year’s NaNovel and realize it’s 185% less terrible than I thought (Vinus Semi-victorious).
5. I get to the end of what I’d written the previous year and get irrationally upset the story isn’t finished (please tell me he kills Nenry).
6. I get rueful when I remember I could just write the end of said novel (Maybe during Camp NaNoWriMo next year?).
7. Gather my writing totems and an assortment of candles (sometimes to motivate myself I write by candlelight in fingerless gloves, pretending I’m in a dusty attic somewhere creating a masterpiece that will hopefully bore the pants off of students two hundred years from now).
8. Snag some Halloween candy halfprice (Hello, Dots. We meet again).

And then presto chango, I’m ready for Nano.

So now I’ll have a rock solid alibi for not blogging during the month of November. And the goal for next year is to have a whole series, a little bit like NaNo for newbies. (Okay, the goal was actually to have said series for this year, but obviously that didn’t happen because I’m a writer and terrible with deadlines. I salute you, Douglas Adams.)