As a bit of a hobby for the last few years I’ve written a few short stories – I even almost finished a full length story (60,000+ words and counting). It’s just mental exercise, a stab at creativity, writing something down. In 2006 I first read about the National Novel Writing Month initiative, where people are invited to write a novel of 50,000 words within the month of November – not to a polished conclusion, but really to get at least that first draft in, and thought that some year I should give it a try.
You can have outlines and such prepared beforehand, but the novel must be something new and original, started on November 1st, and ‘finished’ by November 30th, midnight local time. It’s not deathly serious as you can tell from the site; you become a ‘winner’ simply by uploading your text to their servers in the last week of November to see if you’re over than magical 50,000 word count – it’s largely honour based to get people to actually get something into their PC.
Anyway, after 5 years of watching NaNoWriMo come and go, I decided to give it a go this year, so blog posts to this site might slow or stop next month as the small amount of my personal keyboard time flows into writing some epic work of fiction. How bad can it be? I don’t have anything else on apart from studying for my Japanese test in December, family and work commitments!
All I know so far is that I’ll mostly be writing it on my Mac in Scrivener, and that it’ll most likely be set in some kind of steampunk world, a genre I’ve always kind of liked. More updates on this in a couple of weeks.