Inklings & Musings

Passing the Halfway Point of NaNoWriMo

Today marked the point where I leaped over the 25k hurdle on the NaNoWriMo novel.  The novel must be at least 50k words and written in 30 days.  I managed 25k in 13 days.  I don't know if I can keep up that pace, though.  For one thing, once you get past the difficulty of the opening, it's pretty much smooth sailing for the first 10k of any novel.  Ideas are flowing, you know where you are going, you are just trucking along.  Then you run into your first and then second and then third dry spell.

The other issue, of course, is Thanksgiving also happens to be this month, and I'm not giving up the opportunity to bake pumpkin pies and orange rolls from scratch, just because someone thought that National Write a Novel Month should be November... apparently because January wasn't available.

It will be interesting to see how things go from this point out.  I've had to spend a lot of time figuring out what to do between the bit I had already outlined and the turning point that is near the end.  One of the biggest challenges has been having to relive my teen years by proxy.  Boy... is some of this stuff painful to watch, even if the characters are fictional.  To you teens who are under the impression that because your parents teen years were your entire lifetime ago and then some, that they can't remember what it feels like--you are so wrong.  And I say that in the spirit of love, of course.  Go give one of them a hug and tell them that you are so glad that they survived and made it into their adult years.

To those of you who are considering doing NaNoWriMo another year--go for it.  But be warned--the experience is valuable because it teaches you writing discipline in a way that nothing else can--the pace is terrifyingly relentless.  It also teaches writers who can't seem to manage to get past the first 20 pages or so, to finish.  So... go finish!  To the rest of you who are established writers who have finished something, perhaps what it will give you is merely bragging rights to the marathon of the writing world, but that is also a good reason to do it at least once in your writing career.

As for me, since I am in the latter category, I am just hoping at this point to get mostly to the end before Thanksgiving, such that I can take a few days off, and then sail into the finish line.  We will see if that can happen.

What goals and dreams do you have for yourself?