I’ve been back and forth on doing NaNoWriMo in 2010 for some time now. It is always fun, but also stressful, life-consuming and tends to leave me with manuscripts that are based on decent ideas, but not really well written enough to do anything with. At least, not without ridiculously extensive editing.
Around two weeks ago, I concluded I’d probably try and get a chunk of words done on a new novel in November, but would have to play somewhat fast and loose with the official NaNo rules. I’ve always done this anyway, as I never actually finish the stories in the allotted 50,000 words.
So, I have made up some ridiculously complex personalised rules for myself. I won’t bore you with them, but it involves trying to do about 1,000 words a day, then read over them to make the writing less clunky. And if I miss a day, so be it. No cumulative backlog power-dumps.
This means I’m likely to end up writing… maybe 25 – 30,000 words at an absolute maximum? Which, by NaNo standards, is crap, but is a decent chunk on a new novel and might help me decide if this story idea is working. And hopefully they will be words I don’t venomously hate.
So, yeah, I’m doing NaNoWriMo very badly. Good luck to those of you doing it properly and if you wish to add me on the official NaNoWriMo site, feel free.
(Also, I’m so busy tomorrow with regular blogging/MA stuff that I may not even get my words done. On the first day. This hardly bodes well.)