October is for outlining

Fall never fails to put me in the mood to nest. All I want to do is make a lot of soup, knit, and write. And now that I'm ensconced in the Treehouse, I see a lot of squirrels burying food (and also unburying it) and birds landing on the windowsills to show off to the cats the latest twig or piece of straw they've found. The cats "ack ack ack" at them, in what sounds like some sort of conversation or approval.

I've worked on writing all summer, although I've blogged more about knitting than anything else lately, now that I think about it, and I've got several things close to publishing. It's the formatting and front cover stuff that is a real slog and slows things down, and I have a bad habit of doing major edits as I clean up formatting problems. Probably why I've not blogged about it - how many interesting ways are there to say "wrote x number of words this week, revised x number of scenes this week?"

A couple of weeks ago, I had several story ideas brewing, so I started outlining. If it does nothing else, outlining tells me if the ideas would be novel length or short story length. This is helpful because if I start writing a story assuming it will be a novel and then things run dry, it's frustrating trying to find more story to tell, when in fact the idea may have been better suited to a short story all along. If I can figure out ahead of time which story type it is, then the writing process is a lot less stressful.

Anyway, after some outlining, it looks like I have another novel and several short stories. Seeing as November will be here in a minute, I think I will write the rough draft of the novel as part of National Novel Writing Month. And I think I'm going to increase my word count goal.

NaNoWriMo considers a draft of a novel to be 50,000 words. This is based on the program founder's oh-so-scientific analysis of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (the thinnest book on his bookshelf), which is about that length. However, the average amount of words for most novels is more like 90,000, but 50,000 probably sounded more do-able when he first got the idea for this project. I admit that when I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time in 2005, 50,000 words in a month seemed impossible, and yet I did it with a day to spare while working full-time and going to a week-long medical conference.

I've participated several times since then and have yet to miss the 50,000-word mark, but I always feel like I only have half a novel written, so I usually spend December writing the other half. To write 50,000 words in 30 days, you need to write a minimum of 1667 words a day. Now that I've done it several times, I don't find this to be a difficult daily task. So I thought I'd try to write 90,000 words in November, which is 3000 words a day (if I did the math right). It's more of a challenge since it's nearly double the usual word count, but I think it's still possible. And I can get an entire novel drafted in one month instead of two.

This year's NaNoWriMo project will be a doozy. A Southern gothic tale, into which I can still include some of my beloved magical realism, along with tragedy, family secrets, an abandoned abbey, and other juicy stuff. I may go for all-out decadent with this one, just for kicks.

I'm not sure where the story idea came from. I've read Southern gothic novels in the past, so I'm familiar with the genre, but it's not been my recent reading. I read The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood in one sitting two Saturday mornings ago. I'm also reading the second Claude Izner novel. I'm listening to a radio adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. And I'm working my way through Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. I saw the BBC adaptation several years ago (my introduction to Richard Armitage, who was unbearably good as a dark, smouldering, and tempermental John Thornton), and I'd wanted to read the book ever since. I like it so far. It reminds me of Pride and Prejudice in its plot points, but with a layer of Dickens-like illustration of and commentary on the suffering of the working poor as the age of industrialization gets more of a grip on the nation, not to mention the string of deaths that occur. P&P was published 40 years before N&S, so possibly Gaskell read it and/or used it as a model - although she's more closely associated with the Brontes than with Austen - and apparently Dickens edited the magazine in which N&S was serialized, so he may have had some influence on its writing.) Fascinating reading, whatever its origins and influencers.

So, 3000 words a day, every day, in November. I'll post daily word counts on Twitter, which you should be able to see in the right-hand side bar here on the blog (if you scroll down a bit). I might do quick weekly posts to tell you about my agony, er, progress. We'll see...