NaNoWriMo This November

I missed last year's NaNoWriMo but want to try it this year. For those of you just joining us, that means "National Novel Writing Month" wherein, all across the country and maybe even the world, writers have the month to pound out a 50,000-word manuscript. I used to write without any outline or plans other than maybe a few sentences of what a story might be about, but these days I need pages and pages of notes. Luckily, I have a ready-to-go outline based on a screenplay project that fell through a few months ago but is prime for prose. So I'm going to use that for this year's project and hopefully be able to get it done. Fifty-thousand words isn't a lot and if you give it the beans every night for a couple of hours, say 2000 words a day, you can get it done.

Of course the book will be hard-boiled and two-fisted and full of the normal ingredients of said subject matter, but when I pitched the story to the film producers they liked how I wanted to make the characters the focus, instead of the action, and that's what just might make this story work. It's a typical revenge tale. If you've read anything by Mickey Spillane, whose work primarily influenced the outline, or saw the movie Death Wish, you know what road I'm taking, but I'm going to try and do it a little bit better.

Who knows, maybe it will be good enough to send out. I already have one novel in circulation but there's no law that says you can't have TWO making the rounds.

Unless the story winds up a big load of suck. If that happens I'll try again next year.

But part of the fun of NaNoWriMo is sharing the experience with others. If you plan to participate, feel free to leave comments and share your experience. If nothing else we can all have a few laughs.