Another November has come and almost gone, and with it, the opportunity to participate in a wild, crazy activity called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, or, NaNo, for short). And, since I "did" NaNo this year, I now have 50,000 words of another novel, titled "Scribbles," "under my belt," so to speak.
NaNo, the brain-child of Chris Baty, is one of the best things to have happened to me as a writer since I began writing about two years ago. I was a total novice, feeling my way along in the writing dark, with fits and starts and stumbles. And then came NaNoWriMo, 2006.
I learned to throw writing caution to the wind, to forget about perfection, to forget about anything except getting words on the page. I thought at the time that what I was writing must be drivel, since I was writing so fast, allowing whatever came from the depths of my subconscious to splatter, raw and uncensored, onto the page (or, in my case, onto my computer screen).
But, wonder of wonders, when I went back and read it after I "won" the 50,000 word challenge, I found it wasn't as bad as I'd thought. I finished "...And Night Falls," tweaked and edited it, and had a readable tale to show for my experience.
Not bad for a month of frenetic typing, huh?
