Ah, yes. It’s that time of year again. The time when I drive myself to the brink of insanity by writing a 50,000 word novel in a month.
Okay, that’s pretty dramatic considering this will be my 19th NaNo and I long ago mastered the art of writing those 50,000 words in 30 days, though I do admit that sometimes it can be stressful.
Last year, I actually wrote a novel, a real change of pace from some of the NaNo shenanigans I’ve pulled in previous years. This year, I’m back to my shenanigans. Sort of. I’m still working on a novel, it’s just that I’m adding to an existing story rather than writing a novel from scratch.
My goal for this year is to add 50,000 words to the story What Happened to the Man in the Cabin?.
When I initially wrote what turned out to be a longer short story, I thought it had the potential to be a novella or maybe a novel, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through with adding words. I also had other projects going, so I didn’t really have the time, focus or energy to really explore that option. But, having thought about it for months and having come up with a reasonable expansion plan, I think NaNo is the time to do it.
This will be something of an adventure for me. The original story dealt with two different timelines -the present, where Newly Lowell is being interrogated by Sheriff Adam Joe about an incident that happened thirty years prior; and the past, the incident that took place when Newly and her brothers Thad and Quint were twelve. The expansion plan intends to shift the viewpoint of the past from Newly’s to a more general one, allowing for the past to be expanded more, and to add in the viewpoint of Sheriff Adam Joe, but from the recent past, starting when he finds the Lowell triplets’ father dead and knows they’ll be headed back to town, which will be his opportunity to get answers.
Ambitious? Absolutely. Am I good enough to pull it off? Probably not. But, I think the doing will be very educational and I might end up with something that I can work with in rewrites.
I will also still be working on That’s Punk while I do NaNo, which should make for a fun warm-up if I stick to doing at least 100 words a day on it like I have been. And I’ll be working on podcasting and other audio projects during the month because I failed to appropriately plan ahead this year, so that should be fun and stressful.
This year I plan to keep my daily word count to about 1,700 words a day, just above minimum, writing every day of the month. I think the lower word count will help to counteract the stress of doing something difficult during a busier schedule.
At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
We’ll see how I feel at the end of the month.
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