Day One

Well, yesterday was the first day of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so instead of foregoing a shave (long story), I spent the larger part of the late afternoon/early evening starting the next great American novel. Or just another novel, who knows? But regardless, I’m writing it, and it has begun.

First things first. I had to do my pre-NaNo ritual of going to the NaNo site, logging in, putting in a novel title, and creating and uploading a novel photo. Of course those last two items were the most difficult. I generally write by writing, not by doing a lot of setup work, and my titles come to me after the work is done. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into a title that may not fit later. But I did what they requested of me, and I came up with a title.

Variance.

That is the current title of my novel, and I’m excited about it. Of course, if I decide it doesn’t say what I want it to say I will just change it later. That’s what I tell myself so it doesn’t drive me insane.

After all of that I had to figure out how many words I wanted to set myself as a low limit each day. I know a lot of Wrimers who try to map that out by setting a lower number for the weekdays and a sort of playing catchup with huge workloads on the weekends. I can’t write that way so I set the same low limit every single day during the month. The number I settled on was 2,000 words a day.

That being said, as Day One ended I had hit and passed my goal, with my final number for the day at 2,615. By the end of NaNoWriMo the goal is to be over 50,000 words, which is novel length. I will tell you about some of the content as the month goes on, but I like what I have so far. We’ll see what Day Two brings…

Sam