Any of my readers who are also writers are probably familiar with NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month in which participants try to write a 50k novel in thirty days. Putting aside the fact that 50k is either a very long novella or the bare minimum to be considered a novel by a publisher (some publishers have a higher minimum word count to be considered a novel), it’s an ambitious goal and one that many people burn out on.
I’m doing it this year mostly as a tracking tool. I don’t think I’ll hit 50k words, but it will be interesting to see how much I can write when I actually make a point of prioritizing it, something I don’t do often enough. That said, it’s hard not to get sucked into the metrics and the graph of how you’re writing word count compares to the “goal” of writing 1667 words per day for 30 days.
I’m in the final editing process with my novel Plunder before starting to send it out to publishers. I’ve started the next book, which is a contemporary romance set at a video game company, and I was already about 22k into it when November 1st rolls around. I have no idea if the story will need 72k words (22k plus the goal of writing 50k), but I want to focus on it the way I often struggled with Plunder because of life getting in the way. I’d like to be publishing a book a year or more, and the only way to do that is to become more disciplined and to prioritize my work–and it is work–over shallow things.
(Of course, life may have already gotten in the way of my writing as yesterday Ravi fell and may have a stress fracture in one of his feet (or such a bad sprain that he might as well have a stress fracture) and can’t co-parent until he’s better.)
If you are doing it, please do add me as a buddy–I’m Delilah Night (my pen name)
Because I do want to put a focus on my work, I’m going on hiatus until Dec 1. I’ll be updating Be Quiet, Mommy’s Reading and Delilah Night on a limited schedule, but I think a full hiatus from Expat Bostonians is the right move for me.
