NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words for a novel during the month of November. This will be my fifth year participating, and hopefully my fourth win! I've found that NaNo works perfectly with my writing process, so I've been looking forward to this since, like, February.
I flip-flopped with my decision for this NaNo a couple times. I was torn between some new ideas I've had and doing a complete overhaul of Casanova, which was my NaNo last year. One of my new ideas seemed like it would be a lot of fun to tackle, but I also knew that based on my track record so far this year, NaNo would be my only hope to get any revisions done for Casanova. I haven't made nearly as much progress this year as I hoped I would.
So Casanova won the decision.
"But isn't that cheating?" you might ask. To purists, sure. It's not a brand-new-sparkly idea. But I'm not breaking any NaNo core rules -- I've never used old writing or writing for outside projects to count towards my word count goal during the challenge.
My ideas for Casanova have changed a lot since last year, where I was essentially just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if anything was good enough to stick. I've gotten a much better sense of the characters and the plot, and I have a much better understanding of the setting after our trip to Dallas in December. (Which, honestly, I'm still in shock about. If nothing else I felt like I needed to pick Casanova again to honor that lucky break and the jump my parents took on the project.)
This year I'm actually going into NaNo with an outline!! I honestly don't think I've done that before. The past years that I've won have been complete literary abandon, as they say, and in the past three years that I've won I haven't been able to piece together an actual manuscript. I've got a bunch of writing, and a lot of ideas that I've ended up keeping, but nothing that can be read beginning to end.
My hope this year is that I can attack Casanova with a little more purpose this time and get at least one draft of every single scene I know I need to make the story flow from start to finish. I have a feeling I'm going to resort to a lot of bare-bones, uninteresting narration just to make sure I at least state what's happening rather than skip over it completely. I want to have something that I can hand off to someone and not feel like there's a whole bunch of unexplained stuff that I need to mention before they start reading.
My biggest challenge (aside from keeping focused) is going to be managing my time effectively. I've been doing a really poor job of it recently and I know it's going to take a lot of sweet tea and sheer determination to get me through November lol. I also have three final projects that I have to get done during the course of the month ...
Here's to hoping for a successful NaNo!
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