Week 11: Famous Last Words

So, this is what happens when November starts on a Friday, and a weekend seems full of promise and opportunity... why not start something new...? Why not WRITE A NOVEL, ha ha. And yes, that's what I decided to do: I'm going to give NaNoWriMo a try! Students have done this in the past, and I've always felt kind of jealous. So now: I'm going to do it!

For those of you who don't know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, and it takes place every year in November, although the NaNoWriMo.org website supports writing adventures for all kinds of writers all during the year (I follow them at Twitter). The idea is to write 50,000 words in a month, and the website helps you keep track of your word count progress, awards badges as you move along, with encouraging messages and the opportunity to connect with NaNoWriMo events throughout the month.

Now, I'm not a novelist, but I got an idea for writing a book full of stories about Nasruddin (more about Nasruddin at Wikipedia) and Birbal (Birbal at Wikipedia), intertwining them, and even putting Nasruddin and Birbal together in some stories. It's kind of like a giant Storybook project. I've been a fan of Nasruddin and of Birbal for years, so I have heaps of books I can use with stories. I just have to find maybe an hour to write every day. Can I do that? Heck, I'll get up an hour early in the morning if I have to.

So, I got 2000 words done today, and it was totally fun. Of course, my whole day was totally fun; I was really ready for this weekend! Now we'll see if I can put in another good day tomorrow and build some momentum to carry me through next week:

One motivating thought here is that I could print out this book and give it to my dad for Christmas. He's been really ill (he has terminal lung cancer, and he's actually been on hospice care for almost two years now...), but I think he would get a kick out of these stories, and he will be interested to hear about this whole NaNoWriMo thing. I'll tell him about it when I go there for Thanksgiving, and it sure would be cool to be able to get this printed (like at Lulu or some other print-on-demand service) to give him a copy for Christmas.

I'm not ready to share the stories I wrote today, not yet anyway... but maybe for next week's Famous Last Words I'll have something to share; I should be at around 10,000 words or more by then!

And you know, I really needed this. October was pretty much a nightmare, but writing makes me happy, and so do Nasruddin and Birbal. Here's hoping for a WORDY November. :-)