In case you haven’t heard, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.
It’s that magical time of year when writers around the world huddle at our keyboards and knock out 1667 words each and every day for a month.
Well, maybe not 1667 words each day, but the math works out that way. See, to “win” NaNoWriMo, you have to …
- Write 50,000 new words of fiction
- Write a complete story
- Write a novel … as opposed to a comic book or a textbook or a cookbook
- Do all this between November 1 and November 30
So, back to the math, we have 50,000 words/30 days = 1667 words/day.
Just like I said.
Now, I’ve done NaNoWriMo for four years, and I’ve won every time. I’ve also published most of those books on Amazon.
But not last year.
Last year, I spent November expanding the world of a young hero named Dummy Malloy, who I introduced in a piece of flash fiction earlier in the year.
I finished the first draft around November, closed my computer, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.
Life and other project conspired to pull me off the Malloy track.
But in October of 2019, as I started thinking about this year’s NaNoWriMo, started digging through some files, and guess what hit me right in the ugly face?
Yep, it was that original Dummy Malloy manuscript, unedited, but overall pretty clean.
And now that I’m re-immersed in Dummy’s world, I have little choice but to dig right in again.
That’s what I’m gonna do, too … for NaNoWriMo 2019, I’ll be writing the second book in Dummy’s saga, with an eye toward publishing both novels around the beginning of 2020.
Along the way to Book 2, I’ll track my progress here in this space, and I might let some snippets off the page here and there, or at least some of my research. There were tons of interesting folks in the old west, it turns out, and I enjoy talking about their stories, too.
Hope to see you on the dusty trail.
Be First to Comment