I’ve got a bad feeling about this…
For some reason I’ve made a habit of doing silly things in the month of November. Customarily this involves ridiculous facial hair, however as I reached the zenith of human achievement in that arena last year, the hunt was on for a new challenge, and somehow I got caught up in Kat’s wave of enthusiasm for the literary mountaineering exercise known as NaNoWriMo.
The idea of this strangely named thing is that your personal challenge for the month is to write a 50,000 word novel. Hence where “NaNoWriMo” comes from – a sort of non-acronymmal contraction/hybrid of “National Novel Writing Month”. Even though the nation in question is the USA.
Initially I was extremely wary of the idea – the longest single piece of writing I’ve ever done was in 1994, with a charming 4000 word piece entitled “The malolactic fermentation in Australian table wine”, which lacked anything in the way of plot development or intriguing characters. In point of fact, the only intriguing thing about that was how to write 4000 words of scientific essay when your experiment had produced no useful analytical data at all.
Since then, of course, I’ve routinely knocked out blog posts around the 2000 word mark, and that’s what this job will require – about 1700 words a day for the entire month, in fact.
Yes I know – sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? I was teetering on the brink of saying “there’s no way in hell I’m doing that”, but then Kat mentioned that if you make it to 50k you get to wear the special t-shirt. Game on.
You can check up on my novelwriting progress here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/504408/
I’m still not convinced that this was a good idea, but too late to back out now, eh?