NaNoWriMoFreOPreBlo

Or, as I like to call it: “National Novel Writing Month Freak Out Preparatory Blog”

After this week, and the next week, there are only four weeks left until NaNoWriMo! Time to officially start freaking out, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I participated in my first NaNoWriMo last year, and found the experience pretty interesting. I played by all of the traditional rules, writing every day, lusting after that tasty goal of 50,000 words in ~30 days. While I didn’t attend any local writing meet-ups, or really work within any writing community to speak of, I still found the entire event a great catalyst to plain getting shit done.

I’m going to play again this year, despite having even more on my plate than last year. I wrote nearly 80,000 words last year (ok, some of those came post December 1, but it was in the same fit of writing), which is more fiction than I wrote in the other 11 months combined (I don’t keep track of how much nonfiction I write, for whatever reason).

This year, I’m going to break from tradition, and write a collection of short stories. It’s the same idea in principle, words into stories into a book, it’s just a bunch of smaller narratives instead of one big, epic one.

I also hope to be part of a bigger community this year. If anyone wants to get in on some hot, word on word NaNo action, my handle is: OliverGray14 (my profile picture is the same as my twitter acount, me in a sweet bowler hat)

To prepare, I’ve already outlined the basics of the stories, as well as the plot lines and characters for each. I’ve also started mentally getting into “shitload of writing everyday mode” which involves finger stretching exercises and building my caffeine tolerance. I still need to figure out if my stories are all going to tie together, or if they are going to be stand alone.

Is anyone else out there doing NaNo this year? If so, are you preparing yet, or am I just freakishly proactive?