Last night I successfully kicked off day one of this year's NaNoWriMo which, if you don't know, is an annual self-paced challenge where the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I completed this challenge once about four years ago by going completely over and adapted five of my feature-length screenplays into one epic opus with a 138,222 word-count that was 658 pages long.

There are several reasons that I went so overboard, the first reason being that since I wasn't writing a novel from scratch that I'd give myself more work to do to compensate. The second and third reason kind of go together as reason two stems from the fact that it was my first attempt at writing a novel so when I saw somewhere that a book with a 50,000 word count is more likely to be considered a novella which was not what I was aiming for, leading to reason three.

Even though I openly admit that I went a bit overboard, I'm glad that I opted to go this route because now that I am officially done with the screenwriting world, I've now got five first draft novellas wrapped into one giant book. Leading up to day one of this year's NaNoWriMo, I was working on rewriting the first segment of this uber novel and was able to expand to where it's now a legitimate novel on its own.

I was able to do this because when I worked on draft one I was still in a screenwriters frame of mind where you're limited to write only what can be seen on the screen. This leads to stories filled with dialog and actions without any room for extra words to be wasted on things like inner thoughts or meander insights out of nowhere.

I feel that this website has allowed me to figure out a way to play with my words to where I no longer feel pigeonholed into the screenwriter's way of thinking so I'm excited to write my very first novel that will be written from scratch that I'm currently 1676 words into.

Being that this new novel is the first new piece of fiction that I've written in a really long while mixed with the fact that I opted to write by the seat of my pants minus any pre-planning, it was really hard to figure out how to start but now that the balls rolling, I can't wait to build up my page count and continue to share my progress as I go.

As always, I'll check in tomorrow with another update. I'm going to try to keep this month's Daily Breaker posts to be NaNoWriMo themed but we'll have to see if sitting a writing will be enough to inspire thirty days' worth of details about my writing progress. 

We'll see how things turn out but until then, I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker

P.S. If you are reading this and playing along with this year's NaNoWriMo feel free to add fubunker as your writing buddy and I will buddy you back.