I went to Mad Writers’ Club meetings thinking, I want to write and illustrate children’s books. I still want to do that. But doing the writing prompts, and hearing local author Kelly Martin talk about her experiences with NaNoWriMo, and then hearing that several of my mad writer compatriots were doing it….
Well, shoot, I’ve been saying I’m going to write a novel since I was born, practically. I do some pretty sparkling characterization. I can wrangle description and dialogue. But I’ve always told myself, I’m not that great at plot.
And when I met my husband, who has entire worlds in his head and epic stories to go with them that we play out weekly in RPG stories, I kept telling him we needed to write a novel together, because that dude can PLOT. And invent worlds, which I’m only okay at. It never panned out, I don’t know why. I tried once to follow his story in an RPG with a novel, and got stuck in the endless rewriting chapter one loop.
Anyway along comes Kelly with NaNoWriMo, which I had heard of before, but not with that much interest. A novel in a month, seriously? And when she came to speak to the mad writers I was still thinking children’s books.
But then last Wednesday at the meeting, on the way home, I thought about one of Russ’s RPG worlds and how much I LOVED the character I played. There’s no proprietary stuff in the world, it’s an entirely original concept (not Star Wars or D&D, which we often play). So I thought, I’m going to take that character and run with her, and let her play in the world he devised and see what happens.
I’M GOING TO DO THIS. The thing I’ve been saying I should do, forever. Write a book! No, really!
I am such a Renaissance girl that I don’t think Russ took me too seriously but I’m on fire and I’m rocking it. Day three, I’ve got 7,193 words written out of the final 50,000 goal for the month. I’m sure I’ll hit a snag (with plot, probably) but that feels pretty awesome.
By the way if you’re also a WriMo my super secret code name on the site is chyvalrie, look me up and I’ll cheer you on.
So NaNoWriMo, here I come! Let’s do it!
Loving the Questions 