You’re going to write a book????????

If you really want to freak someone out,  and by someone I mean my mom, I mean really want to get her going, look her in the eye and deliver the following line with complete sincerity, “I’m going to write a book!”

After you deliver this line, one of the following things will happen.  She will start laughing hysterically or you’ll get the concerned look, the one where they look at you as if you just announced your plans to move to the moon.  After all, in her eyes, that’s probably as good an idea as writing a book.  The look will be followed by the emphatically spoken question, “why would you want to do that?”  That’s when you throw in the kicker, “I’m going to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of November.” 

November is National Novel Writing Month and several hundred thousand other writers will write frantically through the month along with me in a frenzy to get to the 50,000 word mark by 11:59:59 on November 30.

It’s not as if my mom is thinking anything I haven’t thought about or told myself.  To borrow a line from my favorite brothers(The Avett Brothers), I haven’t finished a thing since I started my life and I don’t feel much like starting now.  Who am I to think I am going to start and finish a novel in thirty days?  Crazy and impossible are just two of the words that come to my mind.  Maybe that is exactly why I am setting out on this journey, because I have something to prove to myself.  I’m not saying I’m going to produce a novel worthy of publication in November, just that I am going to complete it, because that is what it is about for me, completion.  It will be a month of crank it out, don’t look back, bury your self -editor writing.  The kind of writing I don’t allow myself to do normally because it’s not perfect.  A month long exercise in doing it imperfectly, if you will.

At the end of it all, I will have rights to a lifetime of bragging, and will have enjoyed a month of tasty writing snacks, a month of saying no to the things I want to say no to, and a month to hang out in my pajamas and slippers. It works out to 1700 words per day, about 6 pages double spaced manuscript’s worth.  Seventeen hundred words each day that will add up to 50,000 words of cheeky dialogue, overused plot twists, one dimensional characters and heaps of other rookie writing mistakes to be sure, but, it will be complete.  Take that, self!

Perhaps you’d like to join me, if not writing a novel, what do you have to prove to your self in November?

For more information on National Novel writing month go to www.nonowrimo.org