Sunday, November 2, 2008

To NaNo or not to NaNo

It's that time of year again, when a swarm of potential novelists embark on the mad journey to 50,000 words.  The entire month of November is consumed by rabid word lovers spewing dialogue, descriptions, narrative and plot at blank pages in an attempt to capture the elusive novel.

For those unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, it started ten years ago as a lark by several friends.  The "dare" to write a 50,000 word novel in the span of 30 days.  From that little idea it's blossomed into a global phenomenon with over 1000,000 participants.  I've been participating in this insane event since 2004.  I haven't "won" yet (a win is reaching the 50K word goal), but I still continue to swim upstream.

The issue I constantly encounter is that my Novembers are always ridiculously busy.  Q4 may be slow in some sectors, but for me a ton of moola is made in the last two quarters of the year.  Because of this, I tend to be busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.  This November I'm bouncing coast to coast on a weekly basis to work 3rd shift on a project.  I barely have time for daylight hours, let alone cranking out almost 2000 words a day.

As you can already tell from the word count on my blog, reaching 1000 words a day no matter what time of the year has been a pain.  I would like to put a serious effort toward NaNoWriMo.  Hell, I would like to put a serious effort toward writing a novel.  Its just frustrating that life has a tendency of overbooking itself.