20,000 words (if not 50,000)

Today is the last day of November. I had toyed with participating in National Novel Writing Month, that challenge wherein people write a 50,000-word novel during the 30 days of November. Then I decided that I didn’t really want to do that. I was feeling some significant resistance to the idea. In general, I want to be giving new life to some of my existing work right now, rather than creating new stuff.

But I did want to do some more free writing. So I elected to do a modified version of NaNoWriMo, where I’d write 1000 words every work day in November. I would write about characters and scenarios in an existing novel draft of mine (The Norwegian Secret to Enjoying Winter, for the few folks who read a draft of that). I would work out a few things and think through motivations, with the goal of eventually editing that novel manuscript.

There are 20 workdays in November (weekdays minus Thanksgiving and the Friday after) and I just hit 20,000 words. I didn’t mind the exercise much. I simply put writing 1000 words on my task list each day and I did it. I was reminded that I did like my characters and the general world I created. I do want to revisit it and turn something that exists into something better.

Now I just need to figure out when and how I will do that. I honestly want to take a few weeks away from everything else in life and plow through it but that is going to be hard to pull off! We shall see. But a year from now I would like to have a draft that I am happy with. And then maybe in future years I’ll create an entirely new novel…