I Can’t Believe it Has Been A Year Since The Last Nanowrimo!

Published by simon on November 1, 2006

I can’t believe it has been a year since the last Nanowrimo!

Well, actually it has been only 11 months, it ended on 30th November. But yesterday, being the 1st of November, was the first day of Nanowrimo 2006.

For the uninitiated, Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) is held every year in November, where people are encouraged to finish a 50,000-word novel in the 30 days of the month. It isn’t a competition – there are no prizes or anything of the such, you ‘win’ by completing the novel past 50k words, if you don’t, you just don’t ‘win’. In return, you get a virtual certificate, and the warm glowing feeling that you have completed an actual novel (however unreadable and superfluous it is). And if by some stroke of luck, you manage to get it published, you be alongside the ranks of folks like Dan Brown . J.K. Rowling and er… David Eddings.

Nobody reads the novel if you don’t want them to – you just send your completed masterpiece in text format to the website, and a bot will count the number of words and send the verification back to you in a matter or seconds. That is, provided, you complete the freaking novel, and not stop at “Once upon the time, in a land far, far away…”.

I finished my novel last year, got the cert, and basked in the warm fuzzy feeling of euphoria – all 5 seconds of it. For those not accustomed to writing seriously, let me tell you this – 50k is A LOT OF WORDS. Let’s put it into perspective – a blog entry like this is about 200 words. So Nanowrimo is roughly about 250 blog entries in a month. That’s like 8 or 9 blog entries per day. Not simpler no-brainer entries like this one, a novel has to have detailed plot lines and characterizations. In short, it’s a lot of work.

I remember when working on my novel last year, I spent almost every available minute of my spare time writing – lunch hour, after 5pm, at home in the evening, during the weekends. While I was driving, I was constantly thinking of the plot and continuity, and sometimes also when I was trying to sleep at night. You have to bear in mind that I’m a person without much free time. I have a full time job that takes up more time than the average Malaysian, a full-fledge family, and commitments to my church, SG and Young Adults Group. Not to mention the three blogs running full time. And the number of books I go through a month.

I worked out that I had 25 days out of the 30 to work on the novel, the other five being the days where I had no access to my notebook or was traveling. So that came to 2000 words a day. Every few hundred words, I checked my progress with the word count.

After completing the whole shebang with one day to spare, I spent the next 10 months going “No way am I going to do that again…!”

But in the last one week, I was sorely tempted to try it again, even without a shred of a plot to work on. But when it came down to it, I still decided NOT to do it – I have even more commitment than I did last year (including attending a class), plus I’ll be traveling a lot more. It’s disappointing, but yeah, I won’t be Nano-ing this year.

There was a pre-Nano gathering last year, which I attended at MPH 1-Utama, but it looks like there isn’t one this year.

Anyway, if anyone is keen to try their hand at writing, go for it. It’s only the 1st of the month today. Still lots of time…

(For more info on Nanowrimo, you can check out the official website here, or read my posts on it last year here, here and here).

Technorati Tags: Nanowrimo, writing

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