It’s that time of year again!

It’s fast approaching…. National Novel Writing Month 2017 is coming so quickly, and the month of October is slipping away. The leaves have changed, with a few exceptions of green leaves here and there, and the temperature is cooling just enough for those nice scarves and jackets; where we’re eager for nice warm cup of coffee or tea, and the urge to cuddle up and stay warm is just starting to set in. November is creeping up faster than I thought I would’ve thought, and that also means NaNoWriMo is too.

Ah the month where all the writers, young, old, experienced, inexperienced, all come together and write 50,000 words in a month. They take on the challenge of sitting down and just typing out those words. It becomes both exhilarating and exciting, and stressful as well, as the days go by and we come ever closer to needing to get that word count in. I find it both fun, challenging, and a personal challenge to get my ass into gear and just write.

I look back at the first year I did, back in 2014, and how I had so many ideas and needed to really just write it properly. I had re-written multiple drafts of a story over and over and over again, and even repurposed the story into different outlines, trying to work at it at different angles, and no matter how many times I did this, I wasn’t happy with it. By 2014, I had probably re-worked these same characters into different, yet similar, story lines over a dozen times, and purposed and re-purposed even more outlines. When I finally sat down and wrote for NaNoWriMo, using my most recent attempt for the outline and story into words, formulating it properly with my best possible one yet; it worked. It worked better than it had in any other way. Is it a fantastic piece of work that will definitely get published? Probably not. Does it need to be thoroughly edited and possibly re-worked a bit? Most likely. However, I have come further, and accomplished much more, with this challenge and this story than I had with the years of trying to put this whole thing together. So I am quite thankful for having NaNoWriMo, and the push to just start writing and working the story and outline as I go. It made a huge difference, I think, for me in the end.

Now, as I come to NaNoWriMo 2017, I am nearing the end of the whole story. I will be finishing the last part of it for sure this time. The last 50,000 words will definitely complete the story, bringing it to a close. What will be left, will be editing, and some tough decisions. It will be both sad to see it complete (the rough draft), but also exciting to enter in the final stages of the story. I want to go through and edit the entire thing, from start to finish, and then I think I will try my luck with editors. From there, if everything completely fails, maybe I will go the self-publishing route. I have been in contact with a number of writers who have done self-publishing, so I guess I’ll see what happens in the future.

To everyone who is doing NaNoWriMo, I wish you the best of luck! Let us take on the challenge, and write a glorious 50,000 words to which we will have to edit thoroughly!