I’m one of those people that regularly says: “One day, I’m going to write a novel.” Well now may be my chance. NaNoWriMo is a an annual challenge to write a novel in 30 days, over the month of November. The novel must be at least 50,000 words, which is about 175 pages. I discovered this intriguing contest tonight, via Erik Benson. Erik entered last year and ended up publishing the result, a novel called Man Versus Himself, on Amazon.
OK here are my excuses:
1. I only found out about it tonight, after 10pm, which gives me precisely 3 days to prepare and come up with a plot and characters.
2. I have a full-time job and a two-year old daughter to care for in the evenings (and tonight she didn’t go to sleep until after 10pm).
3. I have no idea whether I’m capable of writing a novel.
4. 50,000 words is an awful lot of words. That’s 1,700 words per day.
5. It sounds slightly less scary to put it into pages: 175 pages in 30 days, or 6 pages per day. Um, no, that’s just as scary!
OK, so those are my excuses. What about my motivations? How about:
1. I was an English Lit major. Nuff said.
2. The NaNoWriMo contest values word-count over artistic merit. What matters is quantity (50,000 words of it), not quality. So that takes some of the pressure off.
3. It will be an interesting process to go through and document here on my weblog.
4. I have 3 days to prepare, I have a full-time job and a baby daughter to care for. I don’t have time for this. What about my weblog writing and my web developing? What about the garden? Summer is nearly here in New Zealand, it’ll be too hot to write. The World Cup rugby finals are on in November!! …hmm, you know this is crazy enough it might just work.
