I wasn’t supposed to do it. This summer I have so much to do. I promised the administration at my school that I’d have a musical written for the fall. I have guests coming from Sweden who will be in Canada for three weeks. I have my son home from school rather than in day camp so we can spend as much time as possible at the cottage. We had a family wedding with out-of-town guests from Peru visiting my brother and sister-in-law. The house needs painting, the cottage needs to be cleaned out and I have a young adult novel in manuscript form that needs a complete rewrite. A good summer’s worth of activity, you might think. Make some time for beach reading too, right?
So, what did I do? I decided to devote July to writing a brand new novel from scratch. Consider it a constructive way to avoid my other commitments.
It all started when I read No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. I couldn’t help myself. I’ve always wanted to do National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) but I’m usually too busy with school in the month of November. So, here I am, doing it in July. It’s only committing to 1667 words a day. So far I’m a bit behind schedule (8300 words behind) but I’m sure I’ll catch up. A a few good 25 page days should do it. Here are my stats so far:
- Amount to be written in order to spread the work out evenly: 1667 words per day.
- Most I’ve ever written in 72 hours: 30 000 words.
- Quantity, not quality, is the emphasis of the challenge so I won’t be doing any more proofreading or editing
- I’ve fallen behind because I had to retype 40 pages of hand-written manuscript.
- Word count to date: 13 400.
- Total words needed by the end on Aug 1, 2008: 50 000 words.
Wish me good luck and happy reading.