Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Na-No-Again-Mo?

So it's getting to be that time of year again. National Novel Writing Month begins on November 1, and signups started a few days ago (minus some server downtime). I've been having very mixed feelings about it recently, to tell the truth. A great deal of me would both love to do it again and love not to.

I think that approaching it for the second time might actually be harder than the first. The first time around, you don't know if you can do it at all. And if it turns out you can't, well, an awful lot of people have never written a novel. You can just remain one of them. But now that I've actually done it once already, I'm in a bit of a pickle. If I don't make it through this time, then I'll learn that I can no longer do something I could do a year ago. And really, I have no clue if I'll be able to manage another book or not. So that's a bit scary, without even factoring in the time and effort involved (each considerable).

On the other hand, it was awesome to actually write an entire novel of my very own. I rarely get to do creative work of any kind on that scale, and it's an incredible feeling when you come out the other end of it and realize what you've accomplished. The insecure artist inside me really wants that boost.

Anyway, what it works out to is that I did go ahead and sign up. And over the next month I will hope and pray that I'll come up with something resembling a character or even (gasp!) a plot. And then we'll see what happens in November.

2 comments:

Wayzgoose said...

Last year we signed up our novels on Blogger. I don't see a registration point yet this year for blogged novels. Is it coming? I've already got my blog open and am working on the design for this year's masterpiece. Please let us know how Blogger will identify novel bloggers this year. Thnx,

Tandava said...

Last year I ran NaNoBlogMo as a separate project in my own personal spare time, and cool though it was, there's no way I'm doing it again. It's just more work than I need, given that I'm already working a day job and writing a novel at night. But if someone else wants to jump in and organize something for this year, that would be cool.