One week to go before NaNo!!<\/p>\n
NaNoWriMo is my favourite time of year. I enjoy it and look forward to it more than “the Christmas season” (I like Christmas the holiday just fine but more than a week of run-up is awful and at least in Toronto it seems to start mid-October as soon as Thanksgiving stuff is done. Sometimes there’s Christmas stuff right next to Halloween supplies. It’s insane.)<\/p>\n
This year my novel is Blackout Odyssey<\/em>–a return to the Melanie!verse<\/a>, namely a magical realism trip through TO. It is a retelling of the Odyssey set in the big blackout of 2003. So that’s been fun to research (typical google search: “nokia models available 2002 southern ontario”). And I can’t wait to get back into writing again after months of editing.<\/p>\n But what is really setting apart this year for me is a new goal: finishing<\/em> a novel in a month.<\/p>\n The previous attempts at NaNo are divided into two types: the ones where I don’t finish because I have the Week 2 Weepies really badly and give up early on and the ones where I do 50,000 words and am nowhere near the end<\/strong>. And trying to continue on into December doesn’t really work for me because of all the aforementioned Christmas Season stuff. Plus, if you think about NaNo as running a marathon… it doesn’t really make sense to run another<\/em> marathon as soon as you cross the finish line, does it? Didn’t think so. Meaning the half-finished novel gets shelved for a while and\/or hangs around my neck like a millstone of guilt until I recover enough to try to finish it.<\/p>\n I know the purpose of NaNo is to write a complete novel in one go and many people manage to do it. I also know that traditional methods for outlining don’t work for me: as soon as I know too much about a story the urge to work on it stops dead. So I’ve just been pantsing my way through November with abandon. Which worked until suddenly I had three novels in the editing queue<\/em> because editing is so much slower than writing. Lousy bottlenecks!<\/p>\n Now that I have plans and goals and shit of a career-y nature I can’t afford to just start a new novel and finish it when I feel like it any more.<\/p>\n So 2017’s goal is no longer 50K in 30 days. I know I can hit that. Instead I want to go from “Once upon a time…” to “they lived happily ever after, the end” in one shot. One month.<\/p>\n I’m gonna need an outline.<\/p>\n\n