Yes, it’s the first day of November. For those of you who partake in the care and feeding of a writer, you might suddenly notice they’ve gone crazier than usual crazy.
It’s NaNo.
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is where usually fairly non-homicidal sane people decide to write a 50k word book in a month.
In a way it’s great. It’s sometimes the kick in the ass some people need to put aside their doubts and just word the words. Wording the words can be the hardest part for some writers, agonizing over how to word those words.
Just write the motherfuckers. (Yes, I swear. If you’ve been following my blog that should not shock you in the slightest.)
This is that month you have permission to vomit it all up onto the page and get ‘er done. Don’t worry about editing or even if the damn thing makes sense. Fluffy pink attack poodles killing everyone in sight? Got it. The hero changes mid-book from a middle-aged accountant to a five-thousand-year-old vampire knight? Cool, go with the flow.
What NaNo is NOT is a way for you to have a book done on December 1 that you then happy-spike like a winning touchdown into KDP’s interface and say SEE-BUY MY POODLE APOCALYPSE!
Just…don’t. Please. Seriously. Don’t.
The POINT of this month is to pry some of the tentacles of self-doubt and worry and all that other bullshit off your brain and WORD THE WORDS. WORD those words so fucking hard that it makes your fingers hurt like crazy. DO NOT worry if the comma should go THERE or THERE. Don’t worry about what adjective for said you should have used (HINT: very few).
Fuck it.
This is literally a month for you to say FUCK IT, and CHUCK it in the FUCK-IT BUCKET. That is to say, you put the WORDS on the LAPTOP (or whatevs) and you do NOT LOOK BACK. How did they go from New York to Miami and their car turned into a train MMGHSDLKSDHFDSLJ FUCK IT!
That is what the editing process is for.
This is why you should BAN yourself from KDP (or Smashwords or wherever) for the next few months. RESIST THE URGE TO PUBLISH. Because the point of writing is NOT to barf word-puke and then sling it at us like a bored monkey in a zoo flinging its feces at us for literal shits and giggles. (Which is how I think that phrase originated, myself. Monkey flinging poo, monkey giggles. Word.)
The POINT of NaNoWriMo is to cut free the tether of doubts and word those words. Word them hard, fast, and furiously, and fuggedaboudit. The point is to “win” by making the word count. To just DO that word thang, you funky writer, you.
This is why December 1st is NOT referred to as PubYoPukMo. If it was, rawk on, but it’s not.
Here’s a secret: Even if you don’t “finish” the book you’re working on, nobody says you HAVE to write the whole book, the same book, or even a bunch of little vignettes that have been screaming for air time in the coffee-saturated cavity between your ears. 50k words in 30 days. That’s DOABLE. Hell, I can easily knock out a few hundred words in the commercial breaks during The Walking Dead (#glennisdead) and no, that’s NOT some magickal mystical special super-human feat.
If you WANT to do it, you can.
Every day there is time SOMEWHERE. Take your phone or tablet to the bathroom with you and e-mail yourself some wordage here and there if you have to. Get up a few minutes earlier every day. Use the voice memo or dictation feature on your smart phone and while walking on the treadmill or whatever SPEAK your wordages.
That all counts. Seriously.
The point is you need to get into a habit. They say it takes about 3 weeks of consistently doing something to make it a habit. The point of this month is to train and teach yourself that yes, you CAN make this a habit. It’s mental muscle memory. People ask me how much I can write in a day and I always preface my answer with remember, I am a full-time writer with a retired Hubby who LITERALLY takes care of everything else for me. That was our deal, he retired and I write full-time. Some days are better days than other for me because of my pain levels and whether or not I’m in a writing or editing cycle with a book. And I’m a caffeine-addicted speed touch-typist. So do NOT ever try to compare your efforts to mine or anyone else’s. All you manage is 200 words a day? Great, that’s 6k words at the end of the month, and in 10 months you’ll have an average sized novel. There are people who take DECADES to write a novel and you did one in less than a year!
Word those words. Word harder, word faster, and don’t worry about if they suck or not. Of course they’re going to suck, that’s the point. The point is you get a ROUGH DRAFT result. It’s not NaNoEdMo.
Write on, peeps. Write on.
In Case You Missed it…
Impact (Suncoast Society 32, MMF, BDSM) is now available from BookStrand.
Initiative (Suncoast Society 31, MMF, BDSM) is available from third-party outlets.
I would just like to point out that you have a potty mouth 😉
xoxo
@Nicole – Yes, and that’s one of the reasons you luuuuuubs me. 🙂