Two Days til NaNoWriMo

I have a cousin who starts getting excited for NaNoWriMo as soon as October hits. She outlines and plans and brainstorms, and her Twitter feed is full of planning updates. She is the person who first got me into National Novel Writing Month, and I am delighted she did. But I am cautious of getting excited for fear of burnout. This year I've ignored it so long that it's jumping out at me unexpectedly.

There are two days left. Really, just tomorrow and a smidge of today. I've been so busy I've only been able to accumulate worry that I won't be able to do NaNo on top of everything else. But that's part of the experience, I guess. My first year of NaNo, I gave up because I was so busy with play rehearsal. This year I'm five times as busy with the musical and myriad other things, but I know how the game is played. Sure, I've only got half an idea, but it could become a wonderful story.

The point is to write. These 30 Days and Nights of Literary Abandon are a chance to let your mind run wild, and even if it's a terrible story, good will come out of it. It is an exercise in willpower to write every day, and it's a discipline to make your imagination work hard enough to come up with a novel's worth of story material in one month. It's not easy. This November, expect to hear complaints and crazy rants from me. This will be my outlet for the craziness NaNoWriMo causes (though it's strange to think more writing will help my writing problems).

My past NaNo novels (two finished plus the one I gave up on) hold a very dear place in my heart. In the future, I plan to revise them and turn them into workable manuscripts. One of them actually wants to be a graphic novel, and that would take a lot of work (especially since I want to illustrate it). I hardly know where to begin. The problem is that these editing and revising tasks are somedays. But NaNoWriMo is for now. Seize the day! Write your story! You'll be glad you did.