NaNoWriMo Begins!

Today is the first day in the race to finish a 50,000 word novel by the end of November! I am participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)! If you're interested, it's no too late. Check them out at www.nanowrimo.com, although it seems like everyone and their mother are already participating and are slowing down their website so much I can't even get on.

My friend Beth (Shims) first alerted me to this awesomely "novel" (hehe) idea. At first I thought, "Wow! Sounds neat!" Then after committing, I thought, "Why the heck did I commit to this possible ulcer inducer?!" But today was the first day and my challenge was to knock out my first 1,667 words. I sat down with nothing in my head but an idea for a problem and the desire to write a fantasy tale. I had two reasons for choosing fantasy: the first was that I like fantasy (easy enough) and the second was because I figured that having no rules in creating my own world would be the easiest way to write fast.

I sat at my computer and... had no idea what to write first. So I came to my third decision. I was going to have to come up with a lot of words fast to make the deadline, so my editor in my brain had to be turned off and instead, I decided to make this an exercise in "free-writing" where I would just start writing whatever popped into my head and let it flow into my fingers and see where it led.

Surprisingly, it became almost as fun as reading a new novel myself! I had no idea where I was going, but just kept writing. When I looked down, I was over 2,000 words with a mysterious storming mountain surrounded by farmland, a mystic jungle, jagged woodsy coasts and four different people groups! I'm so excited to see what happens next that I might start writing some more tonight!

Hopefully the excitement will continue as the days go on. But today was a very good day!

Here's a glimpse at the first paragraph:

It was a dark and stormy night. The air was breathless and tight. Nothing made a noise. Nothing dared. There was a tenseness that was felt to be of a greater proportion to the entirety of everything else. It was the feeling of bated breath, the intake of fearful expectation, before something truly dramatic happens.