my first NaNoWriMo

I finally did it. Encouraged by a girlfriend from Alaska I'm spending November taking a stab at fiction. I'm doing my first NaNoWriMo http://www.nanowrimo.org/. As the website says it's 30 days and nights of literary abandon. In November you try to write a 50,000 word novel draft. Revising is for December. On day #2 I'm already 11% done. That is well ahead of the daily word output of 1667 to stay on track and right now I'm feeling really good.

Part of what helps is knowing that more than 100,000 other folks around the world are doing the same thing. I met about 20 of them last Friday at a regional party at the Milwaukee Area Technical College library in Oak Creek WI. By signing up for this I also get the pep talks and these are great. My favorite quote from a recent one has this:

You will also, however, write some flagrantly nonsensical chapters, create pages and pages of dialogue that make you cry (in a bad way), and endure a few shameful days where the only thing keeping your word-count afloat is the fact that your protagonist has a habit of reading the dictionary aloud whenever she gets nervous. And she's always nervous.

I have so far avoided any nervous characters but you never know--I could have my main character, who works at Milwaukee Public Library, do some long stints of shelf reading and if desperate fill a few pages with call number gibberish.

REG

lhg edited and approved