Having been a spectator to the craziness that is NaNoWriMo for some years now, I have decided to participate this year. I started about a week late (I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened) but i’ve had two very productive days, resulting in 6094 words (out of the 50 000 words required to ‘win’) so far. I’m not wholly convinced I’m going in the right direction with this. I’ve chosen to write an epistolary novel that includes letters (some of which actually get sent), emails, chat transcripts, diary entries, internal monologue, internal dialogue, and phone calls. I’m using different fonts to differentiate between these. Like I said: it might be too complicated or artificial or too far up its own ass to actually work as a readable (if not enjoyable) novel. But hey! The motto is “don’t get it right, get it done”. So I’m writing away. It’s actually kind of fun (she says, after only 2 days of writing) and I hope I can at least finish it. Whether I go beyond a first draft is up in the air.

I love the NaNoWriMo forums, the pep talks, the idea that out there several thousand people are also doing this, and the pure joy I feel when I watch my word count go up. Some of the dares (give your character an annoying trait, have one of your characters make a ridiculous order at Starbucks) are useful, even when you don’t accept them, simply because they shake your brain up and help move things along.

I’ve noticed I like to mention food every couple of paragraphs. Maybe I’ll include a recipe somewhere. Hmm…

Anyway, I wanted to mention that I’m using Scrivener for Mac to write this baby. I used it to write my thesis last year and it served me so well that I’m using it again. Scrivener is basically so great that I’d have to dedicate an entire post to it and so I shall at some later date. But go download a free trial version right now (Mac or Windows) and play around with it and tell me there aren’t some nifty functions in there.

Ok, enough procrastination. Back to writing my NaNo. (Too bad the word count on this post doesn’t count towards my NaNo word count.)