National Novel Writing Month

 

November is National Novel Writing Month – NoNaWriMo – where tens of thousands of writers and would-be-writers challenge themselves to write a 50K word novel in the month of November. There is a website for the project where you can sign up and I guess report your daily word count and compare it to others. I’ve never done it. However, this year…

As planned, I took the summer off from writing fiction to try to come up with a longer, more ambitious novel than the ones I’ve been producing recently. My Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventures have been fun to write, and hopefully fun to read, but they’re what I consider “stories” rather than “novels.” Light reading -- not that I want to write anything too heavy, just a story with a little more depths and expanse. However, I didn’t come up with anything worth pursuing, and now summer is gone and I'm left without a writing project to fill the dark winter days.

Well, here we are at the start of November, on the verge of six months of a Wisconsin winter, a long season that will keep me indoors all day, most days. Now, I’m already a level 93 Klondike “Champion” in MS Solitaire, so I really need something else to fill my days with a bit more, well, productively? I really need a story to write. I had started the sequel to Keiree, got 5,000 words into it, and decided that I didn’t like the way I had planned for it to go, so I put it aside. I have an alternate plot, but not in enough detail to start on it. So, it’s on to plan C…

Play C is The Aerie of a Pirate Prince (working title), a Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure. I had wanted to put that series into hiatus, but it is doing well in the Google Play Store, if not anywhere else. Nothing is doing particularity well anywhere else. In any event, over the last several weeks I have worked out a mystery adventure story featuring Rafe d’Mere and Kee in my head. With the last story I wanted to give it a bit of Gothic air, and this time around we’re shooting for a hard-boiled detective noir air. I’ve got the action taped out for the story, but it's hard at this point to estimate how many words it will take to tell the story. But I think it should land in the 50-60K word range. With all the action set pieces plotted, I think I should be able to finish this one.

So, while I am not going to sign up for NaNoWriMo -- I don’t like word count goals, I’m content just to put in the time and let the word count take care of itself,  I am going to try to finish the first draft of this story by the end of the month, or at the latest, mid-December. We'll see how it goes. Six weeks for a 60K story is not all that much of a reach for me, if I have the story well in mind before I start. I think I have the story in mind, but you never know... We'll see. Stay tuned.