NaNoWriMo 2008

I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner *dancedancedance*! It says so on this nifty certificate right here, all printed out and ready to hang on something prominent. As you can see, the certificate is even on a first name basis with me. We are new good friends and we just met!



With five days left in November, I'm declaring this novel writing month complete (except for the requisite celebrations) for me. I ended up with 51,585 words, written in approximately 60 hours this month. (That's it? 60 hours? It felt like at least 60 gazillion). I also have a complete story in those 51K words which is even better.

This year, I decided to write a mystery. In my youth, there were two sections of the library that I think I managed to read all the books in: the fantasy/sci-fi section and the mystery section. Since I wrote fantasy for NaNoWriMo last time, I thought I'd try my hand at mystery. My co-workers gave me the idea of setting the murder in the corporate world and the idea of a Dilbert-ized murder mystery intrigued me. I don't think I achieved quite the funny Scott Adams does regularly for Dilbert, but at least it was the inspiration. For my detective, I picked a happily married female to defy the loner, unhappily married or single stereotype I'd already encountered several times before. As a matter of fact, some of the easiest scenes for me to write was going home with her and just being part of their oh-so-normal familial routine, complete with cats Ka and Zaia. Ah, how life imitates art. It probably makes for utterly undramatic reading, but it did make the words go by faster.

And they didn't go by very quickly for me this year. In stark contrast to last year, I had no plot outline. I was busy just before November kicked off for some reason that had something to do with Muppets and didn't get to do more than brainstorm elements of the story and about the detective. I didn't even use all of the elements I jotted down and my detective sure didn't end up acting like I had originally intended. I did reinforce my learning from last year that goal-setting is key for me. I set my daily word count goal to the same goal as last year: 2000. And even though I would often sit down at the keyboard with no idea what was happening next, somehow by the time I went to bed sometimes quite late, I'd have those 2000 words. Once again, I lost track of my characters' names and it seemed like I went through a lot of incidental characters this year (red herring potential). I tried to make myself an index to reference, but apparently the characters were coming too fast and furious to keep up (or I got lazy). It will be very interesting to figure out later that I had actually meant Sophie to be the same person as Sarah and the person I called Jonas was initially Jacob. Ah well.

Surprisingly, I also spent less time delving into the community which was so exciting for me to participate in last year. The people are still way cool, of course, but I found myself just typing to the entertainment of my cats and some iTunes music. I 'sponsored' a couple of local write-ins once a week which served to prove to me how much faster I can get through words without the distraction of home stuff. And the commiserating at the write-ins let me know I hadn't completely lost my mind, which was comforting. I completely kicked my word warring habit from last year (*Word War: a friendly competition among NaNoWriMoers in which the person who writes the most words in an agreed upon time frame gets bragging rights). And apparently, I gained the annoying habit of using many parentheses.

And of course, there was the mid-month Write-a-Thon. Thanks to the generosity of family, friends and even some strangers, I got to partake in a thrilling night of writing! It was set in the SoMa Arts Center in San Francisco with a Noir theme. How apropos was that? There were many fedoras and evening gowns to be seen around laptops. We had a tasty pasta dinner and many sweets and caffeine and even alcohol to keep us going. Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo's founder, gave us a humorous overview of the last 10 years of NaNoWriMo and I got to sit next to the attendant who had traveled the farthest to be there that night, Adrian from Sydney, Australia, who incidentally was also writing a mystery.

I understand that common wisdom of NaNoWriMo is that the sophomore year is tough, dragging people down in the depths of despair. I'm glad that I've survived intact, early, albeit less interested in this past story than the previous year's. And now on to gratitude and turkey!