Are you reading enough? Probably not. Why should you read more? Because it makes poor pathetic souls like me, who like to write books, feel like we’re doing something useful. To that end, a number of “Reading Challenges” have been issued this month which I see circling around my writing community.

These challenges are typically designed to get you out of your comfort zone by listing a number of writing prompts. The “number” is often twenty-six so you can read one new book every two weeks. The prompts are in lieu of actual book titles, since it’s the only way to guarantee that no book on the list has already been read.

Here are some typical prompts:

• A book recommended by a librarian
• A book written before 1900.
• A book longer than five hundred pages.
• etc.

I already read about as much as my schedule allows. It’s typically in short bursts as I try to squeeze some time in between other events. I wouldn’t say I read a lot. Perhaps at one time I might have said that until I ran into people (lots of people) who say, “Oh, I read about average: like a thousand books a year.” Uhhhh . . .  I could do that if I did absolutely nothing else. I don’t want to do absolutely nothing else. I’m bursting with all sorts of projects I need to complete.

I’ve looked around at the wide array of book-reading prompts out there and believe me there are a lot of them. Seems like for every ten avid readers out there at least eleven of them have issued some sort of challenge and uploaded it to the interwebs. I would declare this is completely unnecessary except for the singular fact that I want to do the same thing.

I can’t read one book every two weeks, but I can probably read one every two months. And so can you! So here’s Charlie’s Reading Challenge for 2017:

1. A book written in 1941 with exactly eleven chapters but over 200,000 words.
2. Any book currently banned in at least forty countries.
3. A book where the protagonist is a fourteen year old girl named Waldroop who is the mayor of a Midwestern city.
4. A book about a group of seven kids doing nothing as they battle no one in a futuristic utopian society.
5. One of my finished novels.

Hey, it’s not called a challenge for nothing. Good luck!

Around the beginning of each October, I start thinking about NaNoWriMo. It’s like clockwork: right along with cooler weather, changing leaves, and stores heavily draped in Christmas decorations.

Pick a Project, Any Project

One problem. I wasn’t sure what to work on this year. After spending a million hours on the house move and another million at the day job, I hadn’t exactly put much effort into any fiction. In short, all my stories-in-progress sat exactly where they always sit: dangling in various states of incompleteness.

While trying to choose what method I would use to choose a project, a funny thing happened. The project selected itself: Winter’s Gate. I started this one back in 2010 and then picked it up again in 2012. I eventually dropped it for the same reason I drop every story: it wasn’t very good and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.

But about halfway through October, something about it called out to me. “Hey, stupid!” it said. “What?” I replied. “Fix me!”

It’s a science fiction story, so I first had to fix the science. And I did, which boosted my confidence. However, that exercise left me with only a few days before November first—not a lot of time to fix the story.

And They’re Off!

NaNoWriMo 2016 began for me at midnight at a kickoff party in Austin. I stupidly used my laptop earlier that evening without plugging it in. So my battery was down to 19% by the time I arrived at the party. I thought, “Hmmm, I can probably squeeze an hour out of it.” But by kickoff time at midnight, it hit 3% and shut down.

Okay. No power. No story. I’ve had better starts.

I stayed until 1:30 in the morning anyway, scribbling on a pad of paper, just like writers did millions of years ago. I made a little progress. I also interacted with other writers and scored a bunch of leftover food from the potluck. I’ve had worse starts.

After that, the first few days of November went pretty well because I mostly rewrote the first few chapters that I’d already written. But by the time I got to the ten thousand word mark I was venturing into new and difficult territory. I had my beginning. I knew my ending. It was just that pesky ninety percent between those two points that was slowing me down.

Plan B

Clearly I couldn’t go on. So I stopped, took stock of the situation, and defined a new way to win: cheating. Haha. No, I redefined winning as “coming up with a solid, end-to-end, gripping, likeable outline.” If I could do that in a month (something I hadn’t done in six years on this story), I’d call it a win no matter how many words it was.

So I started on the outline, but took a wholly new approach for me: I wrote the synopsis for the last chapter first. Then I wrote the epilogue. Then I wrote a pivotal middle chapter. Then something before that and another thing after that. I hopped around in a completely nonlinear fashion, writing puzzle pieces which I would then assemble into a coherent whole.

And it was extremely efficient doing it this way (instead of writing perfectly-worded, completely-finished chapters, in order). Because if I screwed something up (an implausibility or other such plot hole) then it was easy to fix when it was just a couple paragraphs. And since I would instantly jump from, say Chapter 15 to Chapter 5, it was easy to plant seeds exactly where I needed them, while the ground was still extremely soft.

Final Stretch

It all pretty much came together on November 23. And surprisingly, I even had about 33,000 words down at this point. And here’s where I realized I could win if I cheated. Haha. Okay, yeah. Most of those words were meta-words. Not the story, but the story about the story. And often it involved two or more versions of a scene. If this were the final draft, I think thirty thousand of those words would be excised. But this is Draft Zero: where the author has to tell the story to himself first. So I didn’t delete anything. I didn’t scratch anything out. I just kept typing until I had built up a large pile of words. And, with a week left, I suddenly thought: I could probably start putting real words in with that 33,000 and get to the goal of fifty.

And that’s exactly what I did. I hit 50,277 words and got my third NaNo win in eight attempts. It was a strange and unorthodox journey, but I did it.

And I’m surprised too, considering. I actually spent most of the month on (surprise, surprise) getting the new house ready for Thanksgiving as well as the day job. So I packed all this work into early mornings and late evenings. (I’ll never understand why they chose November for this annual challenge. Me? I would’ve picked a month with thirty-one days and NOT one with a week-long traditional family obligation toward the end.)

The End?

Oh no. The end of NaNo is just the beginning. Draft Zero is a right royal pile of refuse. The story’s in there all right, it’s just buried in a jumbled mess. But I really finally feel like I have something viable.

Stay tuned! I should have something ready for everyone to read within the next one to seventy-two months.