November

It's almost October and you know what that means: National Novel Writing Month is just around the corner. Are you up for writing a complete novel with a minimum 50k words in the month of November? Of course you are!

I first signed up for Nanowrimo in 2005. As I mentioned in my previous post, I "won" that first year but barely. 50,018 was my final word count, if I remember correctly, and the story is all but unreadable. Imagine lots of flashbacks, inner monologues while the MC is driving (in the rain, natch) and endless conversations on couches and in bars. Yeah, I was all about the info dump. And the avoiding of coming up with a workable story line. One of these days I'll fix it...

In the meantime, I am gearing up for this year's challenge. I've not finished a novel since my first try and I'm ready to end my losing streak. This time I am not going to wait until the last minute to come up with my plot. No, this time I am going to try that little thing called "planning" and maybe even some of that crazy "outlining" stuff too. No more waiting until 11/1 to jump into a story; I want to have a plot with a beginning, middle and end roughly sketched out. This outline and this one are the frontrunners; I'll let you know which one I end up using and maybe I'll share some of it here.

November is coming: are you ready?