I first heard about NaNoWriMo from Kristin in July. After looking into it, reading some of the experiences (themselves novel-worthy) by previous participants, and floating the idea by my spouse without incurring a veto, I’ve signed up.
The challenge is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel from scratch between November 1 – November 30, 2004. To be this prolific, I will have to forgo the editing. (Perpetual editing is a problem I have while blogging that, paradoxically, reduces the quality and quantity of what I want to write.)
I will not be posting the content to my blog for a couple of reasons. First, a novel written in such a short time by someone who’s never, ever written a novel before will certainly have a high craptastic quotient. It would be cruel and unusual punishment to inflict that upon you all. Second, knowing my writing was available for any real-time scrutiny (including my spouse’s) would certainly throw me back into perpetual editing mode, which would defeat the purpose of doing this literary marathon.
I will definitely write about the experience, but be aware that I can get very weird when I’m under a lot of duress.
So in the four weeks preceding NaNoWriMo, I’ve read Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! and have found a few useful links:
- Rob’s TGIFriday’s prank — Rob cracks me up.
- 37 plots — a plot generator of sorts.
- Uber-information, useful if you need to know what happened in a particular year.
- Character sheets — I don’t know how much I’ll do pre-planning on this.
- Sci-fi name generator, in case I start calling everyone “Dude.”
Edit: 11/2/2004 — since people are looking for this, here is Erik Benson’s Worksheet.