Let the Madness Begin!

Today is the first day of November. To those that know me, it won't come as a shock that I've decided to once again bite off more than I can probably chew and tackle Nanowrimo. 50,000 words in a month. They can be as craptastic as you can write them—just as long as by 11:59pm on the 30th of November you have 50,000 of them plugged into the Nanowrimo web site so you can be a winner!

Yay winners!

Like I mentioned a few days ago, I've completed this little challenge every year for the past seven years.

I remember the first time I did it. Spewing 50,000 words into a text file (most of them even making sense) and only getting 1/3 of the way finished with my story was one of the coolest things I've ever done. I started out with a single sentence. I think I read No Plot, No Problem before I started, took a deep breath and dove right in.

Thirty days later I had about 55,000 words. The fact that I'd written that much on a single story was amazing to me. The fact that I still had 2/3 of the story to tell was even cooler.

That's when I first understood—novels can be written by mere mortals.

The next two years I wrote parts 2 and 3 to my first Nano, ending up with a novel of 185,000 words that is so craptastic that it will never see the light of day. I think I had one friend read it. She still talks to me, so it wasn't repulsive. But It's probably close.

Who can resist a guy named Paul, who has built in Chaos Armor (yes, I know, copyright and all that, back off, it's Nano for crying out loud), carries a battle ax in one hand and a shield named Daisy in the other. Oh, and he's cursed. What's not to get excited about?

I've also Nano-ed novels about super secret agents, a girl who lives in a dystopian world where Scavengers killed her entire family and she is now alone and a re-make of the Seven Samurai . . . in space.

Where else can I let these wild and crazy things out?

FYI: 2,552 words down!