{"id":231,"date":"2019-11-03T22:34:36","date_gmt":"2019-11-03T22:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/?p=231"},"modified":"2019-11-03T22:34:36","modified_gmt":"2019-11-03T22:34:36","slug":"i-took-the-plunge-and-have-joined-nanowrimo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/2019\/11\/03\/i-took-the-plunge-and-have-joined-nanowrimo\/","title":{"rendered":"I Took the Plunge and Have Joined NaNoWriMo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So it’s November, usually one the three months I am so busy I couldn’t possibly entertain the idea of joining something like a writing competition and yet here I am for the first year ever joining in the festivities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

NaNoWriMo, for those out of the know, stands for National Novel Writing Month which is in November. It’s when a whole bunch of us writers get together and try to just vomit up as much writing as we can. Traditionally this has meant writing in a singular writing project, a novel, as many words as possible a day with the hopes of reaching at least 50,000 words by the end of the month. It’s a quick and dirty competition mostly against one’s self. There is no editing, no thinking, just writing. And I love the spirit of that but for me trying to slog through just one novel in a month, day after day, would drive me insane and make me want to abandon it completely. I just don’t work like that so I set my own goals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This month I pledged, to myself and my writer friends on FaceBook and Twitter, that I would write every day, hopefully at least 2,000 words if possible. It’s been three days and here is what I have accomplished so far: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Day One: <\/strong>I wrote out a short story about a woman spending a night on the town baiting a rapist. Why? Well you’ll just have to wait for me to publish it to find out. It’s a dark story… brought me to some uncomfortable places but I feel like the ending was beautiful and justified. It’s something I wrote in solidarity for the suffering of women and I am proud of it although I have no idea what I am going to do with it. I was completely happy with how it came out and I shall put it aside and edit it properly in a month or two when it is no longer fresh on my mind. It gave me a hard earned 2,897 words. By the end I was emotionally depleted and slept damn well that night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Here’s the lamp I have drawn for the occasion…<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Day Two:<\/strong> I found a stash of old notes – one which vaguely detailed a dream I must have had some months back. The basic concept of it was so endearing I thought it might make an adorable children’s book and so I wrote out 2,759 darling words about a small child who finds themself in possession of a genie – a genie who doesn’t speak a lick of English and who no one understands is a genie. Adorable chaos ensues. This story wrote itself. I had so little to do with it. I picked my characters name from a list of baby names and then everything fell into place like I’d plotted it out – only I didn’t – which is totally nuts seeing as the beginning and end tie together so harmoniously. And the kicker? The ending even made me want to cry and I wrote it! This whole experiment was a bizarre one. I’ve never written for children before – never had the desire – but now I have this sweet little manuscript how can I not spend the time to illustrate it and see what happens? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Day Three: Day three I am cheating a bit because I was busy. Basically I wrote 1,204 words in a journal only I’ll see, another 1088 words in this blog entry<\/a> about my current struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome and “female issues”, and of course the 668 words I wrote in this entry bringing the grand total to: 2906. I’m not displeased but I still feel like it was cheating. I don’t know what I will write tomorrow but I look forward to it! I will check in periodically to tell of my progress… <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how close am I to the 50,000 word goal for the end of the month? Well let’s see – over three days I have completed in total 8,619 words. Not bad! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So it’s November, usually one the three months I am so busy I couldn’t possibly entertain the idea of joining something like a writing competition and yet here I am for the first year ever joining in the festivities. NaNoWriMo,<\/p>\n

Read More I Took the Plunge and Have Joined NaNoWriMo<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":232,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[159,2,91],"tags":[177,182,178,39,179,181],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogging","category-books","category-writing","tag-nanowrimo","tag-national-novel-writing-month","tag-progress","tag-writing","tag-writing-challenge","tag-writing-progress","wpcat-159-id","wpcat-2-id","wpcat-91-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/11\/nanowrimo-508x300.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRChu-3J","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/235"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}