October 31, 2010

NaNoWriMo 2010 - Day 0

It's been a long time since I've written here, and since I've written anything of value in general. But now, after a very big three-week translation project I finally have some time to work on my writing. Of course, the fact that I have the time does not necessarily mean that I will actually use this time to write. This is why I've decided to take the leap and sign up for National Novel Writing Month today. I still have my doubts, and might even delete this post (and the little in shame before the end of the week, but for now I'm optimistic about reaching the 50,000 word goal, mostly because I've already given myself a few breaks, such as:

  1. Since the novel I'm working on is going to be somewhat complex, I'm not really shooting for a completed first draft by the end of the month, just to get a good chunk of it done.
  2. I've been taking a lot of quite detailed notes over the last few months, so a lot of the writing will be developing the ideas into scenes and dialogues.
  3. I've also been writing a lot of lines, short scenes, and so on in my notebooks, so at least some of the work will just consist of copying these into a single (somewhat) organized word document.

So basically, I'm going for 50,000 words of just about any form in a single document, so I could feel that I didn't spend all of 2010 either translating (my own work and others'), writing notes, or blogging. And hopefully, at the end of the month I'll have a large chunk behind me which will help me figure out exactly where this piece is headed and perhaps push me forward to finish it (I know I'm making a lot of very optimistic assumptions here, but the day before the start of a month-long writing project seems ideal for such rhetoric).

I'll try to document my progress on this blog, but naturally, if I only have a few hours a day to dedicate to my writing, working on the novel will always come first. At any rate, you can always check out the counter on the sidebar to the right, because if there's one thing I know for sure, it's that I'll be updating that thing constantly.