First off, I decided to write Night Fall, the parody novel of female vampire hunter "bad girl" protagonists, featuring Katrina Night. I even mocked up a fake book cover last week and posted it on Flickr, to help me visualize the book itself more clearly. I covered the various reasons why I didn’t pick the other novel options a while back. I spent some of my post-surgery recovery time brainstorming and jotting down random ideas that have come to me, and man, I have tons of ideas for this. I’m actually having difficulty narrowing them all down, which is a good sign, I think.

One thing that came up over the past week or so, however, is the question "Why do NaNoWriMo at all?" Chuck Wendig actually did a good job playing devil’s advocate over on his blog (which, if you are not reading, you should be), and I think it’s good to spell out my specific reasons for doing this.

Why I’m Doing This

Justin talked about his reasons for doing it, and a lot of them mirror mine — I’ve kicked around the idea of doing a novel for most of my life, but never actually got the stones to just do it. Strangely, although I’ve worked on books of over 200,000 words by myself, I have a block when it comes to idea of writing a novel. I think I’m rare in that I don’t actually have any novels in any stage of completion in my writing folder, and haven’t at any point in my career. I think once I actually have a novel done, even if it ultimately ends up going nowhere, the seal will be broken and starting the next one will be easier.

On the flip side, I’m trying to make myself as comfortable as possible in starting this because it’s new to me. That means, unlike Justin, I’m actually approaching this with something approximating an outline (which I’ll talk about in a bit).

Another part of it is that, between work and home, I’ve been writing much more frequently, so I’m in the habit of writing at this point. One of the greatest "secrets" of writing is that the more you do it, the more you want to do it. I’m at a good point to try something like this, and NaNoWriMo is conveniently timed — if I was at this point in March, I might be considering a run at a novel in April instead.

Finally, a number of my friends and co-workers are all trying it this year [1]. I actually had a couple of "coffee house" nights with some friends in St. Louis, where we all got together and worked on various projects in the same space. I found that strangely helpful, so I’m eager to see what it’s like writing with other people, pushing each other in the same way that workout buddies push each other during a workout.

So, I don’t think this is something I’ll necessarily do every year (because, as Chuck points out, if you want to write a novel, why wait until November?), but this is a confluence of events that works out for me right now.

My Tools

Notes: After a lot of brainstorming over several pages in my notebook, I’m using a personal wiki to consolidate all my notes into logical buckets. I do still have my trusty moleskine notebooks to fall back on, in case I’m stuck in an elevator with no laptop and a couple thousand words to kill.

Outline: I’m using the snowflake method of plotting (at least the first few steps) to give myself a general outline to work from, and I’ve already got at least something to work from (so in case I don’t have any more time to poke at this between now and November 1, I’m ready to start).

Software: I’m experimenting with using yWriter 5 [2] to write the NaNo draft in, but I’m prepared to just use OpenOffice or even Notepad to hammer it out if needs be. I’m not looking for a neat toy to play around in — I’m just trying to find a way to keep all this fast-and-furious content in some sense of order to make the eventual editing a little easier. I think yWriter will be potentially more useful than it will be distracting, but if it becomes too big of a distraction I can just copy-and-paste my wordcount into yWriter later when I’m at the revision phase.

Strategy and Balancing Projects

While I am trying to commit myself to crossing the 50k finish line, I’m not going to kill myself to do it by November 30th. I don’t want Whitechapel or my paying writing to suffer — all of that will have priority over NaNoWriMo, and if that means I have to finish on December 15th or even by the end of the year, then so be it. In the same fashion, I’m also not necessarily going to stop when I hit word 50,001. If the novel still has legs at that point, I’ll continue to work on it until I can comfortably write THE END.

My strategy, however, is to constantly overwrite — I think I can hit 2,000 daily word targets instead of the recommended 1,667 target, which means I can cross 50,000 words in 25 days instead of 30. Worst case,that leaves me with two days to write two Whitechapel episodes, two days to record and edit those Whitechapel episodes, and one day to use as a buffer. Best case, it actually leaves me three days as a buffer — I am prepared to use Whitechapel wordcount as part of my 50k count to validate that I did, indeed, write 50k in November.

I am not above juggling the numbers on this, especially since the only one I’m doing this to impress is me.

I’ll try to update this blog and/or my Twitter on my NaNoWriMo status, but only if I have time to write after my time writing.

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Footnote 1: Interesting side note — one of my co-workers is actually kicking around doing a novel that is, in terms of flavor and setting, pretty similar to my initial ideas for Thy Kingdom Come. Weird how minds think alike.

Footnote 2: I don’t have a Mac anymore, or else I would totally jump on this offer to get Scrivener after NaNoWriMo.