Did you miss me?

Yep, I did it - a 50,746-word novel written in 29 days. Crazy? Naturally. Challenging? Indubitably. Fun? Immensely.

For those of you who may not know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000-word rough draft of a novel in the 30 days of November. Last year, 42,000 people from something like 17 countries participated, and about 6000 actually made it to 50K. (Everyone always asks why they don't call it International Novel Writing Month, and the only answer the sponsors have come up with is that it doesn't have the same ring to it.) This year, about 60,000 people participated.

Oddly enough, Maryland led the entire month with most words written - 7,148,797, at last count.

Perfection is NOT allowed in this event; messiness is, and that is how novels are written. Rough drafts are supposed to be mostly crap. You have to have something to polish later on for crying out loud – even Michelangelo had to start out with just a big lump of marble. Internal editors (those nasty voices in your head that beat you with a ruler and insist that you will never amount to anything and don't even deserve to hold a pen much less be let near a keyboard) are banned. They are given a month-long holiday, and if they won't go away even with that enticement, they are told to sod off and go pout in the corner.

It sounds insane and impossible, I know. I thought the same thing, and then I did the math. If one writes 1667 words a day or thereabouts, which takes a couple of hours, at the end of 30 days, one will have written 50,000 words. If one is smart, one will write a bit more than that every day, like about 2000 words, if one lives in the Real World and knows that Life has a tendency to make things happen that interfere with endeavors one might have, such as novel writing. Life decided to hand me a week at AHA in the middle of November, and while I tried to keep up my daily word count while I was on site, Dallas wasn't having any of it. Those faculty members would need to have an on-site contact, silly people. Fortunately, my enthusiasm for this utterly ridiculous pursuit hadn't worn off prior to AHA, and so I had written 2000 words a day, and then fell off the wagon entirely while in Dallas. I was in decent enough shape to catch up to it and jump back on again upon returning home, and writing 2000 words a day once again, I managed to finish with a day to spare.

For comparison purposes, a 50,000-word novel works out to about 300 book pages, which is about the length of the following:

Persuasion or Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle

Oh, by the way, the NaNoWriMo people have lots of cool activities, like building children’s libraries in Cambodia and Laos (see Room to Read, an international children’s literacy program), and things like that. They also send you lovely pep talk e-mails once a week so you'll keep at it, they did a podcast this year (WriMo Radio), and they even give you a certificate when you pass 50K.

So I know what you're going to ask - um, Cate, what do you intend to DO with this 50,746-word messy rough draft, now that you've written it? The NaNo people recommend putting it in a drawer or secure computer file for at least a month since you're probably sick of looking at it anyway. Then you can go back to it, if you can stand to look at it again, and see if it is polishable. So that's what I intend to do. Stay tuned to see if it ever makes the light of day or your local bookstore's shelves (it's true - people have actually published the cleaned-up versions of what they've written in NaNo-land).

And then there's the other question - what is your novel about, Cate? Well, it's a rather crowded ghost story that was inspired by two houses - one I used to drive past on my way to see my mom when she lived in Laurel; the other one was my middle-school-best-friend's grandparents' farmhouse in Ohio. Combined, they made a perfect setting for a ghost story, and it would have been blasphemy not to take advantage of that – when the Universe hands me something useful, I don’t argue.

I cringe to think how much tea and chocolate I consumed this month during the writing process, though it was all fuel for a good, though weird, cause. And I must give special thanks to Hunny and Louise, who kept me company while I wrote. Louise found that an amateur novelist's lap is quite comfortable for snoozing, and she even stretched out a paw every once in awhile to hold down the space bar.

If anyone is interested in trying it next year, http://www.nanowrimo.org/ has all the information you could possibly need. Sign-up begins in October, and you can sign up as late as November 25 (hope springs eternal, I suppose). I plan to do it again next year. I will actually miss my evening writing ritual. I have no idea how I will keep myself out of trouble now.