November 1, 2017 by Amy
National Write Something Somewhere Month
For the last two years, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The premise is easy: you write down 1,667 words every day for a month (the month of November) and then at the end of the month you have a 50,000-word book. While the premise is easy, the execution is hard. Some days it’s hard to write ten words, much less 1,667. However, I set myself up both years for success by doing a variety of things, not the least of which was going in with a solid idea of what I wanted to write. The first year I wrote about my experiences working at an all-boys school run by Benedictine monks. I will never publish those stories, but I wanted to get them down for myself and NaNoWriMo was a great motivator to actually do it.* I hit the goal easily and “won.” I was pretty pleased that I was able to say, “Yeah, I wrote a book.” Last year I completed the first draft of the middle-school adventure novel I had begun the year before. I knew where I needed to go with it and had a rough idea of chapters, which made it relatively easy in regards to direction. I’ve spent much of the last year editing and, once I get my changes moved from the hard copy to the electronic version I’ll be able to send it ’round to a select group of beta readers. NaNo was a great motivator to finally finish it. And then I was able to say, “Yeah, I have written two books.” I mean, no one has read them and they just hang out on my computer like petulant teenagers wondering if I’m ever going to let them out of their room again, but yeah, I have written two books.
This year, though, hoooo. I had no projects in mind at all. There’s no National Novel Editing Month (NaNoEdMo, naturally), so I couldn’t use my nearly completed book as my project. And I was coming up dry as far as new ideas.
Then I learned about National Blog Posting Month, or NaBloPoMo, and I was intrigued. The premise is to write a blog post, length be damned, every day for a month. Cool beans…that sounds perfect for this year. Only it turns out that no one does NaBloPoMo any more, probably because it’s hard to say NaBloPoMo and also it sounds a little naughty when you do say it. Huh. Nothing out there to hold me accountable, which is what I need.
So I’m doing my own NaBloPoMo and using the NaNoWriMo platform to track my progress and make sure I write every day. This means you’re gonna get hammered with posts this month and some of them may very well by shitty. But it’ll be my shit, and at least I will be writing. My family will be eating a lot of crock pot meals and I’ll probably look tired for a month straight and I may not respond to your messages until 2018, but I promise I will giggle if you ask me how NaBloPoMo is going, mostly because it just sounds funny.
*I shouldn’t say “never.” Never is a long time, and if a publisher offers to throw a ton of money at me then who knows what could happen. I’m easy like that. But I have no current plans for that particular manuscript to ever be out for public consumption.
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