First, if I were really serious about National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo, I wouldn’t be wasting time writing a blog post. But I am serious about using NaNoWriMo as a tool to push me into a high-speed dash to finish my Funnel Vision sequel by the end of the month.
I haven’t signed up on the site, which exhorts participants to finish 50,000 words by month’s end. That means 18,000-plus by the end of today, or 1667 words per day. My goal is slightly more modest, since my novel was already started – an average of a thousand words a day, though I’m trying for more. I think I’ll need a better average to finish on time, since I think the novel’s going to be a bit longer than the last one, but I’m on target right now.
Why pull a stunt like NaNoWriMo, you might ask? Well, there are a lot of people who call themselves writers who have lots of ideas but just don’t write them down. And there are those of us who have jobs and a multitude of other distractions who write, but have trouble writing enough. I fall in and out of that category. What I want out of this month is not just a good draft of Tornado Pinball, but better habits. And so far, I’m finding high productivity pretty addictive.
I’m off to Orlando Public Library at 3:30 p.m. today to give a presentation about storm chasing and Funnel Vision. But sometime today, those thousand words or so are coming out of my brain, no matter what.
Are you writing?