back on the horse

I'm not sure why I didn't post in September. In October, I cooked a lot, so clearly didn't have a good excuse. But November, well, I did have a good excuse there. I participated in NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. An honor-system contest (there's nothing really to win other than bragging rights) that asks participants to compose 50,000 words in the month of November.

In case you've never attempted to write in such a volume, a single-spaced page with normal 1" margins and Times New Roman font at 12 (a common default on most word processing programs, one page is about 660 words. Now imagine writing just shy of three of those a day. It sounds easy, at first. And truth be told, it is easy towards the beginning of the year. Through our AuNoWriMo (Austin Novel Writing Month) discussion forum, this year I receved a spreadsheet that has all these bells and whistles to track your progress, check your mood (yes, there's a chart for your motivation level), and how many words you've written per hour on average. It was fantastic and completely spoke to the nerdy OCD/anal person that I really am. One of my favorite aspects of that spreadsheet predicts that, if you stay at the pace you are currently writing, you will be done by X date.

After the first day when I more than doubled my day's allottment of words, I was floating around, so pleased with myself. I knew I couldn't keep up the pace, but according to that column of cells, I was going to be done by mid-November. How encouraging! The next day I didn't write anything, but I was still slightly ahead of the game, so all was not lost. The first year I did NaNoWriMo, I only wrote about 10k words. Last year, I think I wrote about 17k. But this year, I wrote 23k. I could certainly have written more - I was not lacking for content - but it was just the time that caused problems. The issue with November is that this year in particular, I traveled up to spend time with my family. And while that is a complete blast (we're all a bunch of weirdos), it does't necessarily help me set aside time to write.

I'm determined to participate in NaNoWriMo next year, and it's looking like the schedule will work in my favor. It's an "Thanksgiving off year" as things go in our family (when my sister spends Thanksgiving with her in-laws and Xmas with us), so I'll likely just hole up in Austin and feed my dog turkey and stuffing while writing.

I know it's a little premature, but I've already scheduled to take the beginning and the end of November off work. Well, that is, I've entered it as such in my Vacation Hours spreadsheet that automatically calculates the hours I've acrued every day and how much I have taken to reveal the balance. Yes, I have a vacation spreadsheet. Feel free to chuckle.

For more on NaNoWriMo - www.nanowrimo.org