November already. Time to set aside the horror screenplay I’ve been working on the past week and get back to the matter at hand: word count. Fifteen hundred fresh words a day, every day until the 30th of November. When I first heard about National Novel Writing Month I thought it sounded 1. crazy and 2. stupid (oddly enough, impossible didn’t cross my mind). Never having written a novel, I jumped in. And what do you know? I wrote one. The next year I wrote another. And the next. Year two, I started planning for it, writing an outline and thinking about how to set myself up for success. Year three and I had the process down.
But this year will be tougher. I am starting a new job in a couple of weeks. My daughter is coming out for a ten-day visit starting tomorrow, and we want to spend as much time as possible. Somehow I will need to manage to carve out two to three hours a day to crank out the draft of this new novel. For the first time, it’s not a first-person narrative– rather, it’s a complex story weaving three very different people’s live together over the span of twenty years and thousands of miles. As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, it’s also set in the 1600s, so there’s plenty of research to be done.
And in the meantime, I am querying my three other novels because I really want an agent. Self-publishing is way too much work on top of everything else.
So, November.
Bring it on.
You’re making the rest of us look bad ;-)
Write on.