November 1 is looming. It's getting closer and closer and even though I spent much of the past 12 months willing November to hurry up, now that it's on the horizon I wish it wasn't so soon. Half the time I'm falling asleep on the couch at 8pm -- I don't know how (if?) I'll be able to make it through the month without a near-frightening amount of caffeinated beverages.

I'm in the process of "outlining" my story. I've been preparing by making notes on flashcards. They're people, places, events, and overall feelings that have characterized the past 3 years. Part of the reason I'm doing this is so that I can kind of form a rough, chronological list of events -- a way of organizing the chaos -- but also so that I can remember as much as possible. This way, if an idea pops into my head randomly, all I have to do is jot it down on a card and later I can rearrange the pieces to add it into the body of my story.

This will definitely be a journey.

It's getting to the point where I'm almost nervous. I should probably stop thinking of it as the novel I eventually want to get published and just think of it as NaNo so I take away the pressure. NaNo = no pressure. I'm sort of ruining that with my big ambitions. So, from now on, it's just another crappy novel I'm writing in 30 days. Nothing to get worked up about.

Also, 8 days to go.

Less than 3 weeks to go. I've been excited for November for a long time, and while I'm glad it's really really close now, I'm also fairly nervous. I haven't done NaNo since 2006, so I think it will probably take a while to get back into the swing of things. Plus, I haven't written seriously in a long time. I'm already predicting that this year may be somewhat of a challenge. Between working 40 hours a week and being a full-time single mom, I barely have time to shower, let alone five minutes of free time. So I'm having a hard time picturing how 50,000 words will be created in the midst of my hectic life. But I think I work best under pressure, when all of life's responsibilities are crammed into a small, time-crunched space, so I'm hoping that with a little less sleep (the precious few hours I steal each night), a lot more coffee (and lattes and espresso and caffeine IVs if need be), and just a bit of creative multi-tasking (i.e. hiding my novel behind Meditech at work all day and taking extra long lunches)... and I think it can get done.

Speaking of the soon-to-be-born novel, I'm actually going the non-fiction route again. When I did NaNo three years ago, I wrote a condensed memoir of my naive 20 years of life. I wrote it mainly because I had to write my autobiography for class, so this gave me an easy way to reach te 50-page minimum for the assignment. But I also wrote it because it was, in a sense, therapeutic. At the time I was about to leave the life I had known (Ithaca) and reimmerse myself in the only home I had ever known (Reading, MA). I was scared and unprepared and needed a way to work out my emotions by creating something familiar and safe. So, my abridged memoir, "20 Good Years" was born.

Fast forward 3 years. The 20 good years I had lived morphed into an indistinguishable, at times dark, and foreign existence that changed everything I knew and everything I will become. I'm sorry if that sounds a little dramatic, but it's a fair characterization of the past few years. Things are finally falling into place, after much turmoil, and I really would like to revisit my life post-Ithaca to now for the same therapeutic reason as before. Writing is how I make sense of the world. It's how I process my emotions and figure out what everything means.

So I'm looking forward to this November. I can't promise there will be all-night write-a-thons filled with Taco Bell runs, skirts and leggings, and delirious 5am artwork (man, that night was fun), but there will nevertheless be a 50,0o0 memoir at the end of the month. And that's a promise.

So...I'm back. After a successful year one (2006) and an unsuccessful year two (2007), I took a year off. The being unsuccessful, I'll admit, had a little to do with my lack of enthusiasm in 2008, but at that point, I'd "grown up" and graduated and become a big girl with a real job. And, frankly, if I couldn't finish a novel that I loved when I had endless freetime (thank you, college) and a real-life support system, I didn't think I could handle it with a 40-hour a week commitment already in place - at a job I started 2 weeks earlier, no less - and all of my support systems far far away.

But I'm ready to give it the old college try again. I've been excited about NaNo ever since the beginning of the year, when I'd realized what I'd missed out on the November before and I'd re-read my novel and decided I loved it and it wasn't as bad as I had thought. It actually had potential - what luck!

In exactly 3 weeks from now, at midnight, I will begin my third attempt at novel-writing mania. I'm semi-cheating because I'm continuing my novel from 2007; NaNo says no pre-existing stories are allowed. But, let's be honest, without NaNo I can't write because I suffer from a severe lack of motivation and an overdose of self-editing. And I love love love this novel (and NaNo-ing). I want it to work and actually become a finished product. Who wants their main character stuck at 22 in what is supposed to be a lifelong story? Not me.

Anyways, I just wanted to share in my excitement and begin the countdown.
21 Days to go.

Ah, so there is one day left in this madness of November, and as much as I hate to admit it, I've stalled. I started out with the loftiest of goals during Thanksgiving Break, but it got too busy and, though I wanted to, I simply couldn't find the time to write my daily word count. And now that I'm back at school, work and papers and classes and commitments have also robbed me of the ability to keep up.

It's weird to think that last year, I was done at about the same time I couldn't handle it this time around. I wish I could have come away from this month a winner yet again, but not so. I've quit just short of 35,000 words. Jenny is permanently stuck at barely twenty-two in the middle of her ex-boyfriend's funeral.

I don't know if picking up where I left off this year next time would be cheating or not, but I'm toying with the idea of continuing this saga in 2008. I guess we'll have to see where I am; we know Jenny will be right where I left her.

I think procrastination and a whole heap of homework/papers/tests may be my novel's undoing.

It's kind of crazy that out of these past twenty-two days, there are only 9 that I've actually reached the word count goal for the day. My last successful 1,667-or-more-words day was on Sunday. Yikes.

In other news, it's Black Friday! (Which means yesterday was Thanksgiving - Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!) My sister and I are going shopping in, oh, about an hour, and though I tried to take a nappish-sleep, I was too excited for all of the impending deals that I just couldn't sleep. And, here I am NaNo-ing, desperately trying to play catch up. Isn't life grand?

I really must be going but, whether you're shopping or writing today, I wish you the best of luck in your adventure. Have a wonderful, crazy Friday!

I'm still ahead (a little!) - 31,566. As long as I keep it around on-schedule, I'll be good to go through Thanksgiving and the day lost driving back to school and all of the tests that next week brings. So far, so good.

I know I've been absent a little while, but in that absence, I caught up on my word count and even got ahead! It was all thanks to a little thing I like to call Wednesday, Staying Up Until the Sun Comes Up. I went into it with a personal goal of 30,000, though Meg (my support system) offered me an incentive of a present if I simply got on schedule with my words (23,339, which rolled in right around 12:45am).

I began writing around midnight, but it was a little slow-going with a lot of procrastination. Frankly, I was just sick of writing about the depressing topic of funerals. I was also exhausted and had to have a half-hot cocoa, half-cappaccino blend to keep me awake. In the spirit of last year, I ordered from The Connection again (a hot pretzel with cheese I'd been wanting for the past couple of days), but sadly, I did not don any of my traditional NaNo garb. I was quite comfy in my pajama pants and sweatshirt, thank you. Towards the end of the evening (or morning, whichever you prefer), around 3 or so, I got a little crazy with the writing. I ended up killing off a celebrity and having my main character ruin a funeral for someone she didn't even know. It was so much more fun than your traditional funeral, something to keep the words coming.

Alas, I fell asleep around 5am, unable to make it until the sun actually came up. Mostly because it decided to sleep in and not poke its head out of the clouds until 6:57am, according to the Weather Channel; I wouldn't know - I was sleeping. I ended with 29,348 words, just 650 shy of my personal goal, but the fact that I'd written nearly 9,000 words was a huge accomplishment for me and I was so so tired. I probably couldn't have written any more if I tried, and though the celebrity-death and mishaps Jenny had in that church were amusing, I'm not sure if they contributed in any way to the purpose of the novel. So, it's for the better I like to think.

Even without Jackie, the adventure was well-worth it - though it wasn't quite as much fun. And I'm more than halfway there!

Weekends are tough for novel-writing.

Thanks a lot, Cortaca.

[12,784]

So, I'm not exactly back on track, but I am leaping towards where I should be for the month. I'm currently at 10,694. You can see this over on yet another new thing I added: my progress calendar. Green dates are days where I reached goal for the day; red dates are days where I didn't quite make it; bright green represents days that I did exceptionally well; and bright red those where I did exceptionally badly (but none of those yet!).

I'm starting to feel pretty mean about my poor main character's sufferings. Each chapter is about a funeral in her life, so all of these happenings are to be expected, but I don't know. I just finished a particularly crazy chapter about a nightmare of a funeral, mostly because I couldn't bring myself to kill another person. It's coming along, slowly but surely.

I was doing so wonderfully, and then I don't know what happened. On Friday, I pushed ahead on a break from classes to get 3,462 words. On Saturday, I had absolutely nothing to do and I didn't write my novel anyway. On Sunday, I had work and work-related meetings for 7 hours in a row and there was no time to write my novel. Now, it's Monday, the busiest, most-frustrating day of my week and there's probably no time for novel-writing again. Five days in, and already three days behind?? It's atrocious, I know.

But I'm still not worried. I've got a whole lot of nothing to do this week and, unlike on Saturday, I intend to use that time for some very productive novel-writing - beginning tomorrow at 7:15am, when I'll be done registering for classes for next semester and won't let myself go back to sleep. I intend to get back on track within a couple of days. Wish me luck.

Fiction is a whole lot harder than I thought it would have been.

I began NaNo (superexcitedly) at midnight today and went to bed with about a page and 587 words of my novel completed. I decided later today that the way I was writing was stupid, so I deleted the whole thing (I know, I know - cheating) and started over. It's the same story and everything, but yikes. I have no idea who my characters are or where they're going. I mean, that's the fun of NaNo, so I'm excited. Just nervous. I wasn't truly under the spell last time, so it's taking a little getting used to.

I convinced Stevie to give it a try - yay! I made Meg an official NaNo calendar so that she can keep track of my progress throughout the month and be a fabulous support system. November 14th is Stay Up Until the Sun Comes Up! I know it's a Wednesday, but it's really the only day that works for me - it's at a good time to pick up the pace and get that last little writing push in before Thanksgiving break.

My word count today is 1,677. Ten words ahead of schedule, and it couldn't have come at a more perfect time in the story because I have no idea where I'm going next. Haha. That's for tomorrow.

Unlike last week, when I think Fall Break had something to do with all of the excitement, I'm not so excited anymore. I'm feeling overwhelmed at the thought of writing 50,000 words in 30 days -- What am I? Crazy? Uh, yes.

All of my professors thought it would be really nice of them if we had papers due in November instead of December "when all of the other professors will be having papers due." Yes, normally, that would be helpful. Except when ALL of your professors have that mentality. It's silliness. But last year I survived all of my homework while writing, and surprisingly, finished most of it early and better than I ever would have had I not been NaNo-ing. So, we'll see. Maybe all this anxiety is for nothing.

While I'm here complaining, I wanted to let you know a couple of things that are much more important than all of that:

First, I added something to the blog on the left called Good Search. It's a search engine, powered by Yahoo!, that gives a penny to the charity of your choice for every search you perform. It doesn't seem like a lot, but coming from a fundraising job, I know that every little bit helps more than anyone ever thinks, and if every NaNo participant used Good Search for all of November, they would have enough money to pay for several of their programs just from searching. So, naturally I'm pushing the NaNo cause, but really it's great to donate to any charity that you support. If you want to support Novel Writing Month, simply choose "The Office of Letters and Light" as your charity. Thanks.

I've been reading a lot of things about NaNo on their website, which is really a wealth of information. I'm not sure if I'm going to do this yet, because I don't know how many people would be interested, but they have an Author Sponsorship program, where people could sponsor my novel just like a marathon. Obviously, if I decide to do it, I'll post all of the information here.

Also! Last year, Jackie and I stayed up until the sun came up one weekend during November in a crazy attempt to really up our word counts. We were tired afterwards, but it definitely worked. Apparently, NaNo had their own version of this (and why wouldn't they?) called Write-a-thon. It's a little less intense because they only stay up until midnight, but on November 17th, a bunch of novel writers get together and write like crazy for six hours while people sponsor them. I won't be able to do it then for a bunch of reasons, but I'm really excited to attempt another stay-up-until-the-sun-comes-up extravaganza.

I really must be going to prepare for Halloween parties galore this weekend. And, if there's any time, I can use the rest of October to get ahead on homework, papers, and all of the school that will be getting in the way of my masterpiece. Wish me luck! and Happy Halloween! and I'll see you in November!

NaNoWriMo is almost here! Just 2 weeks to go, and I can hardly wait. I've been waiting impatiently since some time around February when I thought of a brilliant idea for my novel. I have been trying so hard not to overthink it and get myself into that rut where I care about how it comes out too much to actually finish, and so far, I've been pretty successful.

My novel does already have a title - My Life in Funerals - that came with the idea. I've been doing a little feeling around on the topic so I don't run out of things to say during the course of November but no formal planning. I'm not really an outlining kind of girl, and I know from experience that too much trying will probably cause my downfall before I even begin. As opposed to my last attempt, this one will be pure, 100% real fiction. I haven't written something like that since...perhaps tenth grade. So this is a big deal.

And, as I've just edited this thing about six times before publishing it, I've just realized how glad I am for this outlet to somehow edit during this upcoming craziness of quantity-over-quality. Ah! Thank you, blog. Anyways, I'll see you all again at the one week mark!

I officially finished my first NaNo!

On the bus home today, I crossed the 50,000 word threshold. And kept going because I was stuck in the middle of an anecdote and had to get out before I could live with myself stopping. It was a great anecdote, really, though I suppose that's something you'll just have to take my word for.

Looking back at my novel, and I have looked over parts of it (which I may never do again), I've decided it's really not good. There are gems, to be sure, but the majority of it's just crap. But I suppose that's NaNo for you, making pure crap completely acceptable. I skipped both the best and worst parts of my life - middle school and high school, respectably - and I don't know why. When I started, that's what I wanted to write about the most. Now, they're nowhere to be seen.

It was a blast, and now not only do I have my very own autobiography/novel to show off (or not), I have this nifty obsession with word count. [181]

See you next NaNo!!

Hitting the finish line isn't exciting like I'd hoped it would be.

I am proof that procrastination works wonders:

So that 15-page paper that's due tomorrow, I have almost 14,000 more words added to my novel to show for it. I simply cannot bring myself to do that stupid paper, but at least I was a productive procrastinator, I suppose.

Now there's just a little meeting and some dinner to stand between me and finishing that paper. But no more NaNo. That probably would not turn out so well for my Government grade.

Disclaimer: During my writer's crisis I thought it best to switch gears on my autobiography, something I definitely couldn't have done had it been pure fiction. Instead of going from past to present, I abruptly (after a brief explanation) move from somewhere during fifth grade to talking about college and begin going backwards into the past.

I'm not sure that it's working to tell the story I want to tell, but it's definitely getting the word count up. I'm able to write so much more vividly and so much more story-like with these more recent events, just because they are so recent. Stories from so long ago were a bit hazy and read a lot more like a scattered bit of what actually happened. Those parts ended up being not very involving and not very interesting, to tell the truth. The thing is, I know the whole story, so it doesn't matter that it's out of order, but to anyone else, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's probably a good thing, then, that no one but me will ever read this little slice of my life.

I love that NaNo makes this all okay.

We saw the sun come up Sunday morning, that sneaky little bugger. It stayed pitch dark until almost 6:30, and for a while there, we were beginning to doubt that it would make an appearance at all. But it did, and we made it through (with pretty artwork to prove it)!

Overall, the exhausting experience was quite fun what with rainy walks with carrots, Taco Bell trips, and of course, our ridiculously trendy NaNo ensembles. It successfully pushed me just past the halfway mark. I don't think I'll be able to write until Wednesday, at the earliest, so thankfully I got ahead when I did. I have two large, terrifying exams tomorrow (Psych and Marketing) as well as a 15-page research paper for Government, a print ad, a Psych paper, and a team project by Friday.
Woo hoo!

Just before Thanksgiving Break, on Thursday, I will hopefully have all of that finished and can truly enjoy my Smart Monkey time with Jackie and be productive. And then, Thanksgiving!!! Which means not only a relatively relaxing break from school, but a trip to Michigan and ample time to NaNo along the way as well.