NaNoWriMo!

So I have challenged myself to complete a first draft of a short novel, the one I've been planning to write for more than a year now. I say "planning" because that's as far as I ever got, in a year... jotted ideas/notes, sketching out characters, putting to paper conversations that might take place between those characters, stuff like that. But I could never quite get myself to actually start the story-telling part. I'd heard of National Novel Writing Month, of course, but nothing lit the fire under me to actually DO it until now. Self-publishing my little book of poems was the spark that lit the proverbial fire, and I signed up last month. The basic premise is that you commit to yourself to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. That works out to something like 1,667 words per day. 

I'm trying to remind myself that it's about more than just the word count, though. Yeah, I know the commitment is 50,000 words and I am striving for that, of course. But I don't want to get so caught up in the word counts that I lose the magic of the story telling itself to me as I write it. So I'm not going to post daily word counts (when they're good) or beat myself up publicly (when they're not so good). Instead, I'll stick to posting those milestone word counts, like maybe every 5,000? I don't know yet. 

I have to admit something here. I'm feeling really good about this challenge, because I have finally started the get-down-to-business telling of this story that I have inside of me. I have learned many things about myself through psychotherapy, and one of those is that I tend to spend so much time thinking about doing things, that more often than not, I never get around to actually doing them. (Including therapy itself! I thought about it for a year before I finally made the call and started!) Well friends, 2014 has been a year of doing for me, and finally writing the novel I've been thinking about for more than a year is a fitting way to end that year. 

Don't you think?