Every year I have tried to participate in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Every year something has blocked my efforts. Not this year.
The object is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, using the month of November as the time clock. Writing begins on the first and ends on the last day of the month at 11:59 PM. Somebody wrote a column noting in error that the event required only 30,000 words. Some veterans would probably consider that child’s play, but for writers like me who work on the fly with no home computer (it’s a long story: longer than 50,000 words), writing at all is a privilege fought for and agonized over at the same time. It does force a writer to focus on getting time to write, though the tradeoff can be pages of garbled snippets of mis-matched ideas. Fortunately participants are encouraged to edit the results in the spring.
So far I have managed to nearly get the required 1,666 words per day down in my difficult Microsoft Word Windows 8 environment, with few typos but lots of dangling idea threads. If I had to pause to structure, nothing would go on the page. I have about 200 left to do today, and I will get them done after I tell you I’m doing so. Bye for now.
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