NaNoWriMo 2007

So about four years ago I started to hear little things round the internet regarding this National Novel Writing Month. It's been happening every November since 1999, and the gist of it is that people from all over the world sign up to write 50,000 words of a single discrete fiction piece between November 1st and November 30th.

If you do the math, you will notice that that is an average of 1,666 and 2/3 words per day. Every day. For a month. Now, if I write 2,000-3,000 words of fiction in a week, I consider myself productive. A 10,000-word month is pretty decent, and a 20,000-word month is something I don't even aspire to. So it was always a good thing that November, being the month of my birthday, has had a week of vacation in it every year since I found out about NaNoWriMo. If 50,000 words sounded crazy in a regular month, it was doubly crazy in a month minus a week in Paris.

This year, I thought I was OK for excuses because even though I'm not going on vacation, I do have a deadline in early December for a research-heavy feature article for the History Channel Magazine. Somehow, though, I managed to call to myself a gauzy wisp of an idea in the shower yesterday, about ten hours before the official start of NaNoWriMo, and that evening I signed up. Two hours before midnight I still didn't even know who my characters were, but I sat down at 12:01 am and started winging it.

So far today I have written almost 3,000 words. I am not the kind of person who writes 3,000 words in a day. Words trickle from me as though physically squeezed by the Gorgonic editor in my head. Today though, the editor is locked in the closet, because it doesn't matter if the words are any good. It only matters that they are words.