In my last post, I talked a lot about Halloween and how that season inspires me. The best part about Halloween is that the inspiration and creativity leads right into NaNoWriMo.
For those who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month. Anyone can do NaNoWriMo. It starts at midnight after Halloween, and using the resources available on the NaNoWriMo website, write a 50,000 word novel by 11:59 pm on November 30. You create an account on the website, and get to work writing. You’re allowed to plan out what you want to write beforehand, but you’re not allowed to use something that you’ve already started writing. Oh, and you get some cool prizes for participation and for completing the 50,000 words.
I have not ever participated in NaNoWriMo, as I have always found myself in the middle of a writing project at the start of November. I spent all of October struggling with the decision of whether or not to participate this year. I really felt like I should go for it, because I call myself a writer but I’ve never done NaNoWriMo and that just seems silly. However, taking a break from Rose would be incredibly hard.
Switching back and forth between writing projects is difficult. Keeping tones, characters, settings, and most importantly the voices of the narrators separate is quite the task. With Rose, I’ve already got a difficult challenge switching back and forth between Rose’s and Phillippe’s perspectives and the narration is difficult to keep straight. They have opposing voices and viewpoints, and that’s why I love using both perspectives.
I can’t imagine switching to an additional perspective in a completely different world, and then trying to switch back to Rose. I was planning on using Powerful as my NaNoWriMo project (because the first chapter is garbage and should no longer be in existence), but it’s so different from Rose that I can’t intermix those two. Trust me, after already attempting that switch I know it’s not a good idea. I’m really making progress with Rose right now, and I don’t want to ruin that. As much as I want to take another look at Powerful and I want to participate in NaNoWriMo, I will take this year off and hopefully next year I will be ready to really dedicate my month to writing.
In place of writing an entire novel this month, I am going to dedicate this month to finishing Rose. While the realistic side of me is telling me that there’s no way I can finish the entire novel this month, I am still determined to write as much as I can. I’m hoping to write at least 20,000 words by the end of the month. That means I’ve got to write 5,000 words a week. It’s very intimidating. Currently I’m at 14,117 words with the rewrites, and I’m planning for Rose to be about 60,000 words total. I’ll post updates here every week about how I’m meeting my goals, so stay tuned to see my progress.
I’m also planning to post weekly inspiration from the NaNoWriMo website to encourage me and anyone else who is planning on tackling this crazy daunting challenge.
That’s all for now! Happy Writing and Happy NaNoWriMo!
~Alyson
