The Month Begins
It was November 1st and NaNoWriMo was well underway. I stayed up late the previous night to get a midnight start on the writing and wrote a few paragraphs whilst following my outline fairly closely. The writing was a bit slow and clunky and I hated the way I phrased a few of my sentences. I sat and deeply thought about what would sound better like I usually did. I kept doing that until I remembered what the contest was about and so I stopped editing myself so much and just ran with it leaving sentences I didn’t like behind…unless I really hated them. My notebook is a battleground of scratched out sentences.
I forsook all distractions the night before. I unplugged my Xbox 360 and logged out of all
my social networking sites aside from email clients. My iPod was unplugged, drained of battery,
and left in the corner of my table because I knew with it that I’d waste
valuable writing time on the bus listening to music and staring out the
window. I told my friends via Facebook
and a few texts that I wouldn’t be around for the month of November because the
contest. I had a plan and I wanted to
stick to it for a few reasons. My first
reason was because I’d never stuck to a plan, schedule, or routine and I really
really wanted to break that cycle. I
want to be a much more productive person and I saw this as a major step for
that. My second reason is because I
really really wanted to get some traction on this second book while the events
of the first one were still in my head and the ideas were flowing. There was no better time to do it. So no distractions meant getting things done.
I left out of my house before the sun was even up, around
6:00am. I wrote a lot on the bus which
helped me finish that first chapter which I felt a little better about because
of how I ended it. I made it to work
around 7-ish and continued writing. I
wrote in the dark and empty café. I had
my notebook out and was ready to start typing the first chapter up on
NaNoWriMo.org. I browsed the site and
learned that you didn’t type out anything on the site itself but instead posted
your word count. You could take your own
count or “validate” your novel early which counted the words for you and
promised not to be a portal for novel theft.
Eh, I trusted it. So anyway,
armed with this new knowledge I opted to continue my early morning work visits so
I would continue to treat this noveling business as legitimate business. I updated my word count and checked my phone
to see if I could do it from there and to my surprise I could. What a thoughtful team of visionaries, these
NaNo people.
I moved my show from the café and the distraction of WiFi to
the signal deathtrap of the basement breakroom where it was hot and stuffy from
all the machinery and steam pipes. I
began working on my second chapter, writing it down in my notebook. More inspiration found me in the form of a
visit from a cute older lady named Myra.
She asked if I was doing homework and I told her about NaNoWriMo. She seemed pleasantly shocked and said what I
was doing was cool. She herself likes to
write and had been working on something off and on. I told her that she should just go for it and
soon. If not for the month then just
whenever. She said that she should,
smiled, said that she didn’t want to be a bother, and walked off down the
hall. I went back to writing and maybe
10 minutes later Kurt the pastor comes in and asks me what I’m working on and I
tell him what I told Myra. He asks if he
could read it when I’m done and I asked him if he had a Kindle or Kindle
software so I could send him a free sample.
He didn’t but he gave me his card and well wishes. That was pretty much how my conversation went
with anyone who caught me writing for the next month.
So all in all I was off to a good start. I had an outline that stretched far ahead of
me. I had a decent place to get my
writing done, updating my word count was much easier than expected, and my book
was rolling along at a decent though somewhat slow pace. With a start like that I had no clue that my
challenges to come would have me questioning if I should even waste my time
trying to finish the contest.
