Dateline 10-28-2017

In yesterday's post, I mentioned that I might actively attempt to put an extra effort into completing the current draft of my novel by the first of the month in order to compete in this year's NaNoWriMo challenge. Part of me wants to participate because it's been a long time since I've written anything from scratch but I also want to give myself a break from this current story before I give it a read and take notes for one more polishing draft to publicly share by New Year's Day.

For those of you who don't know what NaNoWriMo is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month and is a challenge that takes place every November and is to credit for the first draft of the novel I am currently rewriting. I wasn't planning on participating this year but then I saw a friend's post on Facebook calling everyone out to get involved.

When I first read this post, I thought that I had too much work to do on this rewrite to be able to fit in another challenge but as the start date nears right around the same time that I could/should be aiming to wrap up the draft, I'm starting to think that I actually do what to give the challenge a chance and write my very first novel that isn't an adaptation of prior work.

I'm still not fully committed to this plan because I have a lot to do to get the current novel ready to share by New Year's. Yesterday's mention was my first half-assed attempt at committing and even though this tentative plan was stated just twenty-four hours ago it seemed a bit far-fetched considering I had five days to go and close to sixty pages to get to which due to the illustrations each of these undone pages take twice as long as a traditional rewrite effort.

Last night, I was able to knock out fifteen pages of rewritten content which was not only exciting because I got so much done but it also led me to believe that the first is a doable deadline to get everything done in time to start this year's NaNoWriMo on opening day instead of having to wait up to a week late and then have to rush to catch up.

It's the fact that I couldn't see myself starting this year's NaNoWriMo on time that made me less enthusiastic about getting involved at all but now I'm excited because this approaching starting line has now created a set and achievable deadline that I know will motivate me to get everything done on time.

I have no idea what I plan to write as my NaNoWriMo novel but that is all part of the fun of the challenge. Last time was fun but I didn't feel like I got the full experience because I was adapting one of my scripts into a novel as opposed to flying by the seat of my pants which I think was the initial intent of the challenge.

Oh well, we'll see what ends up happening and as always, I'll be sure to check in tomorrow with what does.

Talk to you then.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker