NaNoWriMo 2015 Countdown!

 

It's hard to believe that in 26 days, I will be sitting down to eagerly write the beginning of an extraordinary and exhilarating story.

And in about 28 days, I'll probably be freaking out about my word count. It happens.

NaNoWriMo has been crucial for my writing because I am forced to start and end something. Most of us would be confident in starting a story because we get this gorgeous image or understandable character or hilarious dialogue and we just need to write it down right this second! And then we realize one conversation can't hold a novel and we abandon it.

I completed the 50K words in 2012 and 2014, and I reached 17K in 2013 (let's just not talk about that year, shall we?). This year, I'm doing something I've never done: I'm outlining and planning.


I spent most of today researching scientific facts and related information so I'm not doing this work during November, which would simply be procrastination and would prevent me from actually writing. I hope that by having this information handy, it would also speed up some of the dialogue scenes when this "plot" is explained and shown to the protagonist.

I've had this idea for many years, and it started between me and my brother. In college, I wrote it as a television show and completed three episodes. However, I realized that since I wasn't going into screenwriting any time soon, it would make sense to take this idea I'd toyed with for almost a decade and make it into a novel.

I've always outlined my novels when I wrote them on my own time, but for NaNoWriMo I've always pantsed it. In 2012, I forgot about NaNo halfway through the first day and sat down to write the first 5,000 words for a mystery novel that absolutely sucked because I'd never read a mystery book in my life. In 2013 was a YA modern fantasy that has been in the works since 2004 and still is (it is also my baby among all my creations and will probably never be "ready" enough in my eyes for me to submit). Last year was another idea, a plot point really, that I took and ran with.

This year, I'm organizing research notes and sources, outlining each chapter, and cultivating the ending before November 1st arrives. I'm not saying I won't abandon the outline by the 15th, but at least I know how I'm starting. After all, the ending will come whether it's planned or not, just like Nov. 30th will arrive whether I've finished or not.

What will you be doing for NaNoWriMo this year?