Bleeding Fiction

So, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) began on Saturday. The premise, unsurprisingly, is to write an entire novel in the space of a month (November - duh). To keep anyone from taking the easy way out and writing a short children's book along the lines of, say, "Go, Dog. Go!", the novel you write has to be a minimum of 50,000 words long, that being the sort of minimum length for a novel.

NaNoWriMo is something Ann introduced me to last year. At that point I was only just gearing up to begin on my first novel and wasn't ready to participate, but Ann went great guns and turned out a novel somewhere in the area of 70k. This year, she's at it again and at last count was just over 37k. In under a week! The girl blows my mind; she's incredible.

I'm not participating in NaNo this year, again. I was considering it, but Wolf's Rain has been taking me a lot longer than I'd planned on and I really wanted to have it done and out of the way before I got started on another project. That said, my actual feelings about the event are a bit mixed.

As a general concept, I think NaNo is a great thing. It provides encouragement and support in the way of user forums and "writing dares" and a time for all of those people who've always said "yeah, I'll write a novel one day" to just sit down and do it. And that's cool.

As far as what I see in it for me, well, that I'm just not so sure about. I go back and forth. On the one hand, it's an interesting challenge, to see if I can do it. Also it means another novel finished and frees me to go on to another project as soon as I'm done. Also (lame as this may be) I think Ann would respect it if I did, and that's sort of important to me right now. On the other hand, I have a pretty solid writing schedule and I'm pretty good about sticking to it; I don't exactly need the push to get me writing. More, I don't like too much the idea of speeding through a project just to get it done. I mean yeah, that's the point and it's better not to go back and edit while you're writing, but I don't want to just throw anything at all on the page to get it done.

Now at this point, for this year, the entire discussion is academic: I still haven't finished Wolf's Rain and it's already November 6th. But for next year? Well, really, the only way to see if it's for me is to give it a try. So that's the plan: make sure my writing schedule is free and clear for NaNo next year and do it and see if I enjoy it. Meanwhile, for this year, I'll just finish Wolf's Rain and be insanely proud of Ann.