NaNoWriMo Time

It’s that time of the year again. Beginning of November, the time when most writers, especially the aspiring kind, get excited and plunge deep into writing. It’s like the writer’s New Year. Time to wipe the slate clean, and make some “resolution”.

I have to say that I’m quite sentimental about NaNoWriMo. After a long break in writing fiction it was this initiative that spurred me back into action. Well, end the character’s nagging in my brain, but that’s another story. It was this contest, that got me started two years ago on the Dragon’s Reborn series. I think fondly of that NaNoWriMo, despite the fact that I failed miserably at it.

Turned out switching into a foreign language and upgrading my technical skills from “aspiring” to a professional level required a lot more work. I just wasn’t ready. Though I still have the nearly 20k words I wrote for that project.

When looking for feedback while working on it the dreaded “too much telling” came up. I knew in theory what it meant. But I didn’t see it back then. I didn’t feel the difference. After two years, I would like to thing I improved a lot in that department.

There are a lot of rules beginning writers need to take in. But you can read and learn about the theory forever, only practice gets you to a place where at least some of these rules become so ingrained that you apply them subconsciously. Or at least they immediately jump out at you in revision (yes, I word vomit my first draft, so no way to skip revision).

But I digress. As I mentioned already, I always think fondly of NaNoWriMo, but I won’t be participating this year. At least not directly. Rather than start a new novel, I have several projects screaming at me and demanding to be finished. Since I’m trying to cut down on the number of projects active at the same time and get stuff done this year I couldn’t officially participate and play by the rules.

Instead, I will try to aim for the 50k word count for this month. This will likely run across several projects (including a short story for a sf anthology). My main goal is to finish The Hunt, which has been work in progress for a bit too long.

Since I’m having fun with that one by posting the draft as I write it on WattPad, you can follow my progress there. OK, draft plus a quick revision… I’ll write progress posts on here too, just to give myself an extra challenge.