Tuesday evening, 73° and hazy
Listening to Led Zeppelin, The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair
Why I’m Editing Through NaNoWriMo
I thought quite a lot about how I would approach NaNoWriMo 2016, and didn’t settle on a decision until late last night. This will be my ninth tenth NaNoWriMo. For the last eight nine years, I’ve written an all-new novel. I’ve gotten skilled enough at NaNo that three of my last four Nano novels are in the queue to get revised, polished and published. You could say I’m a little like a chipmunk writing stories and socking them away like acorns to be feasted on at a later date.
Finding that brand new story and getting most of it committed to paper in just 30 days is part of the beauty of NaNo. But my hang up this year is that I’m already mid-story and going full-steam on a book I deeply believe in. I was torn between setting that aside for an entire month to chase a new story, or using the added pressure of NaNo to finish the story at hand.
Dressed as a chipmunk at a Halloween party last night, I tried my damnedest to talk my adult nephew—an aspiring writer— into doing NaNo this year. We have this conversation annually. It’s getting to be a tradition with us. As usual, I extolled the joys of hog-tying one’s inner editor and writing an all-new story in 30 days. As usual, he promised to seriously consider giving it a go this year.
And then.
I went home, took off my chipmunk costume, and decided to commit 50,000 words (newly written or edited) to my work already in progress.
It’s official: I’m a NaNo Rebel this year. I’ve already proven to myself eight nine times over that I can write a new, 50,000-word story in 30 days. Now I get to prove to myself that I can finish drafting Robin’s yet-to-be-titled monomyth.
It’s on.
By the way, I may not be blogging much, if at all, over the next 30 days.
CC0 Public Domain image by Sergey Klimkin via Pixabay.
