Finally, time to get that horrible introduction off the first post on the homepage.

The project I'm working on now, throughout the month of November, is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. I've participated in something similar in the past - creating a visual novel over a single month (I think it was February) - which was... successful in that I created a visual novel with a friend (who did the coding) and another (who did the art). It was not very good and is probably deleted from the internet for reasons I don't want to go into because it would reveal how long ago it was.

The idea behind NaNoWriMo is self-explanatory: to write a novel in a month. It's also a bit misleading.

The goals are a simple: write 50,000 words over the course of November. For those of you unaware of average page lengths and word lengths, I generally think of 300-350 words per page of a book, and about 100,000 words is a "standard" 300 page book. I typically read fantasy, which skews much longer, but those are averages I've seen.

So 50,000 words turns out to be about 150 pages of a printed book. Which is a lot to write in a month, but it's not really what I would consider a novel. Even John Scalzi, the most popular author I can think of that tends to write books on the shorter side (keep in mind my bias of preferring fantasy, with some sci-fi mixed in), is somewhere in the 200s at least.

But also, once you finish NaNoWriMo, you basically have a rough draft of a story, no where near an actual novel yet.

The actual point of NaNoWriMo, as I see it, is to force someone to keep writing regardless of the quality. To keep going forward, ignore editing, and just get the story onto page. That, at least in my own experience, is the hardest part of writing in the first place.

I tend to enjoy editing. In fact, most of the things that I've put on paper this month have had at least 2-3 editing passes as I write it to make it sound better (this may be hard to believe, and I'm with you on that). But there's still this inertia keeping me from starting on something entirely new, knowing that it's hard to know where to start and getting disgusted at the first few attempts to get words on paper. Refinement is fun, but creating is hard.

So now that we have the point of NaNoWriMo, I'll reveal that I don't actually care about the stated goals of the project. The non-profit that hosted/organized NaNoWriMo went bust earlier this year. "Why" is complicated for a few reasons, but is mostly boils down to a lack of funds and a huge backlash due to their stance on artificial intelligence's place in writing. I won't touch on the subject because I honestly don't care.

But, to take a step back, the purpose of NaNoWriMo is to keep writing, and that's why my own personal goal is to have a post out every day. As I am on the east coast time zone of the United States, I have yet to miss a day. I've gotten very close - one post this week was 5 minutes before midnight - but I've kept at it. If I manage to make my 30 posts in 30 days, regardless of where the story is or what quality that story is at, I will consider that a success.

The story I'm telling is something that's been percolating in my mind for a long time. It has endlessly evolved, incorporating new things and discarding others, but I generally have a handle on what I want. That being said, as early as Day 1 I learned something new/interesting about the story.

And more importantly, as early as Day 2, I wanted to go back to edit earlier bits to better fit with what I wrote after.

But that's not what NaNoWriMo is about. It's about getting a rough draft that I can then use as a base later on. And as long as I keep that in mind, I won't mind the slop.