Preptober

Hey all, it’s that time again!

The days are already short and the trees are already blushing and naked. Pumpkin spice everything is everywhere, and I dug my sweaters and warmest sweatpants out of storage.

NaNoWriMo is upon us.

If you're new here, National Novel Writing Month is an annual challenge where people try to write a 50,000-word draft of a novel between November 1 and November 30. That works out to 1667 words per day. It’s a grueling task that prioritizes getting your story down and is the time of year where the most caffeine is purchased and consumed in my home.

I’m doing it. My fiancée is doing it.

She’s completed the challenge twice. This is my fifth attempt.

I’m working on the same story I’ve tried to do the last couple of times I tried NaNoWriMo. It’s a story called Urban Legend, which follows a masked, serial-killing, vigilante and the cop who tries to track him down. Over two tries, I’ve gotten close to 30,000 words of it down. This year I hope to finish it. I don’t know if that means adding 50K to what I have now, but for the first time, I have a concrete plan.

October is usually “Prep-tober” for NaNoWriMo participants and is usually when people do the research and outlining that make the writing part easier. I like to consider myself a “plantser,” someone who has a rough plan, but allows the story to go where it needs to go. The last two attempts at completing this challenge had me lost in the weeds. This time, though, I finally completed the outline of the main story arc. It only took three years. And as another October comes to an end, I find myself excited and ready to go. I got my outline. I got my caffeine. I got my writing partners. And I have a plan.

I also have music selected. I like to write to a mood, and the soundtrack I have this year is full of old funk grooves. I’ll share that over the course of next month.

My fiancée and I plan to start at midnight on November 1, immediately after some Halloween movies. From there, I’ll follow my road map to either 50,000 new words or the end of my story, whichever comes first.

If you’re doing NaNo this year, let me know. I’m a believer in the notion that it takes a village to write a story, and there’s plenty of room here.

#nanowrimo #prep #fall #writing