And so begins November

Blogger is on West Coast time. When a post would be published at midnight, in reality, it was already 2 in the morning where I was.

It's 2am in Nebraska. Right now, I'm probably getting home. From midnight onward, I was writing at the Perkins on O Street, kicking off November.

It's National Novel Writing Month, or as it's more commonly known as, NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write a novel, 50k words or more, in 30 days. It's an exercise in turning off the inner editor, to hang up the hang-ups over whether or not that's the right word, obsessively editing what was written and pacing back and forth over the same ground without making any real progress toward the end. The editing, the polishing and proofing and ruthless cutting, that comes after the meat of the novel is produced. NaNoWriMo produces the meat. If you choose to cut it into something marketable, it's up to you.

NaNoWriMo has produced novels which, after polishing and cutting, went on to be published. NaNoWriMo has spawned ideas from the monthly projects, a tangent thread to follow, which in turn produces a novel fit for publication.

It's not a formula that works for everyone. Some people flounder instead of fly in the unbound freedom of it all. Not every novel, even if cut and polished, will be fit for publication. Very few novels actually face the wrath of an editing pen. It's a month of nonsense, a lesson in powering through writer's blocks, training in a habit of writing a little bit every single day.

All you need to stay on the goal is 1667 words a day. That will put you at 50,000 words by November 30th.

There's a novel idea I've been wanting to do for a while. The core elements, the basic plot. But I hadn't found quite the right setting, the perfect stage to make the characters shine. In 2013, I think I might have solved that problem.

In November 2013, I also received my breast cancer diagnosis. I was ahead of the projected word count, I was turning out easily 2,000 to 3,000 words a day. But the diagnosis derailed me. Hard.

I did some more writing in the spring, but not very much. I'd lost the motivation for fiction writing. My energy went instead into this blog, into a memoir which is still far from being where I can give it a final period.

I knew November would come around again. They changed the rules, a work in progress was now allowed as a novel entry, provided we started counting the word count at zero on November first, and only factored in the words we wrote through the month of November.

I'm picking the novel back up. It only has 30,000 words to it. A little more than that, actually, but not by much. I want to find my creative drive again. I want to get this story told, about the daughter of a necromancer, the science-minded son of a mage, a shadow dragon and his family.

If I can do this, if I can finish this novel without falling behind the curve (some allowance will be made over Thanksgiving as we're hosting it this year) then I will allow myself something else: the attempt to get into nursing school. If I can't keep up the energy and drive to stay ahead of the daily word count, to finish this novel, then I can't keep up with the demands of nursing school. If I want to go, I'll get this done.

So take a break from a month-long parade of anti-pink, and expect updates to be more sparse this month. What does come across this blog will very likely pertain to writing woes.

And in case you're a fellow NaNo'er, my pen name on the boards is Zanne Chaos.