I think many people know about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo which happens in November. This November writing challenge began in 1999. Camp NanoWriMo began in 2011 and it currently has two events, one in April and the second in July. In short, the goal is to draft a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I have been part of this since November 2017.
Since 2017, I've been a prolific writer. I find that strange only because I've been trying to do other things for that entire time. But having a NaNoWriMo event three times a year has kept me actively writing. I don't think I'll give up writing, but it isn't the priority that it once was.
For the April challenge, and I thought about it for months, I didn't think I had another new novel in me. This many be the case from here on out, who knows? But I do know that I have a half a dozen folders that have little vignettes and sketches for novels. I haven't dipped into those yet. Some of them are thirty years old, or more.
I also have a few more larger pieces of writing that for years I counted as novels when they really weren't. There is Exile which I initially wrote in 1993. It's got about 17,000 words. I have not read it since 1993 and there's a good chance I never read it at all. There is Twenty Four Hours in Vancouver. I wrote that one in a thirty-six hour period in late November 1999 after a very scary trip to Vancouver, BC. Although this one has about 28,000 words, I don't really consider this a novel. The following year, while working at Standard Insurance in Portland, Oregon, I wrote a piece called Mascaras y Muñecas which was a very episodic story. This once I also considered a novel, but again, at 28,000 words, it simply is not.
The fourth one called The Cataract I wrote in the mornings in Puerto Vallarta when I was there in August and September 2001. I wrote for 2 or 3 hours every morning. I was really taken by this story. It was the first one I wrote out long hand. When I finally got home from Mexico, I was eager to work on it. I did the second draft that fall. And I never looked back. This thing, something I also considered a novel was only 8,900 words.
That said, I have four “novels” on my hands that are not really novels at all. Should I ever get the time, I always thought, I'll really do a second draft, or a complete rewrite of these. I've never liked the idea of rewriting something that is 20 or 30 years old, I'm a different person and a very different writer now. I started to think about this back in January knowing it these might be good options for NaNoWriMo.
If there is any advice I can give to those who want to do NaNoWriMo, it's this: make a plan. I mean, sure, make a plan about what you want to write, planning a novel is a good thing for some. I'm not that way. I mean plan for how you're going to work. Plan the time of day you'll work. Make a plan for the conflicts and the characters and the conversations. I like to stop my writing session in the middle of a sentence, especially a sentence in dialog, that way, my mind is still trying to finish that sentence. When I get back to work, I get to pick up right off.
I had decided to rework one of my former “novels” and it was just a question of which one. I decided straight off to avoid Exile but as I'm thinking about it now, I have a dozen things I could do with it. I also decided to avoid Twenty Four Hours in Vancouver. Leaving me with the Mascaras y Muñecas or The Cataract. I knew either would be good. The case for Mascaras y Muñecas was very good because I wrote the prequel to it last November. The characters are still fresh in my mind. The Cataract ultimately captured my imagination. For starters, it had the smallest word count. And we were on our way to Astoria for a family vacation in March, and that was where I set the story.
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