Mom, She's Doing It Again!

It's October 31, which means that after I'm done handing out candy to the ghouls and princesses and pirates and various furry animals my life is going to become absorbed by the vicious and all-consuming entity known as NaNoWriMo. It seems I didn't learn my lesson last year. Either that, or my surprising success convinced me that I'm able to do the impossible.

Did I say impossible? True, writing 50,000 words in thirty days is no small feat, but it's not impossible. There were 13,000 winners last year alone, myself among them, so it seems likely that I'd be able to accomplish the same thing again. And I would be, if it weren't for two small things.

First, last year I had a plot and a cast of nearly two dozen characters. This year I have a rough idea of location and a few key events. Basically I know how the story starts, and a few things that happen in the middle, but I haven't a clue how it's going to end. And as for characters, there are only six so far, three of whom actually do something significant. (One of the other three seems to talk a lot, and I've got high hopes for him becoming a key part of the story at some point in the future.) Only one of the three 'important' characters has a name, and I'm not sure if she'll even meet the other two.

That one's minor - that is to say, I can work with it. I trust my muse/creative subconscious/writer inside/whatever you want to call it, and I know that if I write faithfully the story will come. The bigger problem is this - I'm leaving for London in just over two weeks. I'm going to visit a friend who I haven't seen in over a year, and I'm going to see London, and I have no intention of writing once I've left Heathrow. I worked it out though. As long as I can write 2,632 words a day, I can still make it to 50,000 by the end of the month.

I guess I'm lucky no one really reads this blog, because I'd be sent to the loony bin for sure. No one in their write mind would go inflict all this stress on themselves just to produce a novel which is sure to be nothing more than a steaming pile of crap. But when I tried to talk myself out of it, I couldn't. Part of me needs to do this again, I guess. If I'm a wreck come December, we'll all know why. In the meantime, I'm trying to get my knitting and Sims fix and also do some major cleaning all in the next few hours. Because lord knows I'm not going to have time for any of that in November.