When NaNoWriMo began, back in 1999, it took place in July. Part of me still wishes it did. You see, July offers three distinct advantages over November:

1. July has thirty-one days, not thirty.
2. July is free from a four day, family-oriented Thanksgiving weekend.
3. July provides five additional months to finish your New Years resolution instead of just one.

So you see, writing a novel in a single month is hard enough without the shortened schedule that November brings.

Kickoff

This year I decided to pick up a manuscript I began in 2013. Apart from a brief-but-pointless bit of editing in 2016, I haven’t even thought about it for five years. Strictly speaking, NaNoWriMo should be about a wholly new project, but it’s not unusual for participants to dust off an old project and give it another go.

And I have some good news on that November-is-too-short issue. There actually is a way to turn November into a thirty-one day month. As with prior years, I kicked off NaNo at Dragon’s Lair late Halloween evening. And at the stroke of midnight, one hundred or more writing enthusiasts and I set fingers to keyboards (or, as a few traditionalists do, pens to paper) and began our creations.

And that’s how we add an extra day to a short month. Although it’s technically November, it still feels like October and many of us complete our full day’s word count in those first two hours. We then go home, sleep, wake up, go to our jobs, and then that evening begin our “second” day of writing.

Chapter One

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

“You don’t know about me without you read a book by the name of Tom Sawyer.”

“Call me Ishmael”

The opening line is important. But NaNo’s quantity-over-quality pace doesn’t always lend itself to perfect prose. Still, the book has to open somehow and I didn’t want to reuse my 2013 opening, so I had to come up with something new.

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

Ah yes, my favorite opening. I didn’t use these exact words, of course, but I prefer the dark and I prefer the rain so it really is the best combination. Except that “a dark and stormy night” didn’t actually fit the plot. So at five minutes past midnight I found myself stuck.

Chapter One, Still

A couple days later — the first weekend in November — something came up and I didn’t make much progress. Then there was a business trip. Then a long weekend out of town. Then more work. I tried to poke at the manuscript at least a few minutes each day, but halfway through the month I was still hammering away at Chapter One.

Nothing was coming together. Every new paragraph invalidated the previous. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten stuck — not by a long shot — but it was the first time I started to seriously reconsider this whole writing thing. Like, really reconsider. Like, what is the point in trying this again and again and never ever getting anywhere? As Albus Dumbledore said in The Empire Strikes Back, “The definition of insanity is trying to write the same book over and over and expecting different results.”

Word Count

The good news is, I didn’t give up and I managed to push past the first chapter. I made it up to and through the plot’s inciting incident. But to say I was taking things slow is an understatement. Back in 2014, I hit my fifty-thousand word goal in ten days. While I’m not good with the maths, I do know that’s more than two hundred words per day, which is about all I averaged this month.

BUT . . . I think I’m onto something. In spite of only getting some ten percent done, I feel like I have a decent start. In fact, this gives me a real fighting advantage when I give this manuscript another go in November 2023.

The real sad part? I gave up blogging for the month for that. I feel bad, so to make up for it, please enjoy this beautiful rendition of Silent Night:

That is me playing the violin, Biz playing flute, and Laura playing the guitar. We recorded that in 1989 to be the outgoing message on my answering machine. It’s now a family Christmas classic.