NaNoUhOh
.November is NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. Last year, I edited the second draft of my novel (mostly) during November, and was happy with how that went. About a month or maybe six weeks ago, a friend mentioned NaNoWriMo and I thought, well, I’m not going to write my next novel during it, but I should do extensive planning.
While writing my last novel, I discovered that lack of good planning hurts, and so am determined to plan the next one out properly, so that I know how many chapters there are (I’m undecided right now, between twelve and fifteen), and then to plan each chapter, and indeed each 1000-word section of each chapter, in advance so that the writing is mainly just filling in that framework.
I thought, then, that November would be a good time to do this planning. With a target of sixty thousand words for this novel’s first draft, that’s two sections of planning per day, or maybe ten days of chapter planning followed by twenty days of three sections per day. In any case, it felt reasonable, and I thought I’d prepare myself for it with some consideration and pre-planning.
At around 17:00 this afternoon, the same friend reminded me that November starts tomorrow. Whoops. I haven’t thought about NaNoWriMo, or my editing plan, or my next novel, since that last conversation. It’s still a good idea in theory, but I feel entirely unprepared to start planning tomorrow, or to commit to something like that for the next month.
Nevertheless, it might be a good idea, and might be just what’s needed to get the next novel going. We’ll see.