Oh No! NaNo! ;)

:) Week One. For those of you NOT doing this fun ride with me, I hope you stick with the blog during this frenzy of mine, perhaps I might not be as *loquacious* as usual on All Things Jennifer, we will see. My goal is to hit 2000 words a day the first week…so I can coast along the rest of the time. You can track my progress on the sidebar over there…or check out my page here.

I have several ideas rolling in my head and I have no particular outline to follow. I have a deal going on with my friend Doug, and I promised I would have a rough, rough draft by, yikes! Did we say DECEMBER???

Also, a collection of short stories…and well, at least a novel or two in mind (let’s call it a series) I am not really going to worry about rolling out ONE finished complete project…I am going to go with the flow and see what happens, MY BIGGEST HURDLE has always been, well getting it out there, raw, unedited and imperfect. I like to edit as I go and this month is NOT going to let me, so it will be interesting.

And with that said…here is some encouragement from Chris Baty, the Director of NaNoWriMo :)

Dear Author,

(I like this part!)

The keys to thriving in Week One are straightforward:

Surge early. To be on par for the month, you should be writing 1667 words per day. In Week One, try to get 2000 or 2500 a day, and beg, borrow, and steal as much of the first weekend as possible to write. You won’t need to keep up this pace throughout the month, but nothing guarantees a NaNoWriMo victory (and a fun month) like opening up a hefty lead in the first week.

I can do this, I can DO THIS! I can…

Embrace the fear. It’s okay to be nervous. Nervous just means you’re pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone—which is when great and magical things happen. Even if you have a complete story outline to serve as a map for the month, it’s still terrifying to be stepping out into the frontier of your imagination. I blame this on a lifetime of exposure to the perplexing idea that art should be made by artists, and novels left to novelists.

Hm, maybe I am naive, but I am not NERVOUS at all, excited, hecks yeah! But nervous? Nope!

As someone who has done NaNoWriMo for eight years now, I can tell you this: Novels are not written by novelists. Novels are written by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels. Whatever your writing experience, you have a book in you that only you can write. And November is a beautiful month to get it written.

“Novels are written by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels. Whatever your writing experience, you have a book in you that only you can write.” And maybe this is why I’m not nervous, I believe this…I have for years. I just need to motivate myself, as always to DO IT! :)