50,041 Words

I've been involved in a personal project for the past month in which the object is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, no matter how bad it is.

This was started by a guy in California who set up this event called NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. It's supposed to take place in November, but that will be a terrible month for me to get anything like this done because of it being a big month for retail businesses, so I gave myself the challenge to write in the month of July. And then I couldn't help myself so I just started in on June 28th and went to town with it.

It is, in a word, terrible. In two words, utter crapola. This novel is nowhere near readable, but that isn't really the point. The point is to get one's arse in a chair and write, no matter how badly it's going. And there's no time to go back and edit (well, no time if you're working two jobs and fighting migraines and are responsible for making sure you're wearing clean clothes to work, etc., etc.). For me, this was an exercise in letting go of my perfectionistic tendancies. Believe me, I was so depressed last week that I nearly didn't finish this at all because it was so horrid.

In fact, this novel is so bad that I don't have a title on it, other than "The Great American Crapola Novel." It was supposed to be a romantic comedy. In some places I probably achieved that, but in other places it reads like a spy thriller / suspense novel and in other places it reads like a bad soap opera. In fact, if I just wrote in identical twins who were switched at birth, lost their memories, and then had a penchant for falling in love with people who were all wrong for them, then, yes, it would qualify as a soap opera.

So, forget asking to read any of it, because it's horribly unreadable. I even screwed up the whole time line in these last few days of writing, so you'd be completely lost if you did get past all of the repetitiveness and the woeful lack of much description.

But, I did it.

Good grief, if I can do this for 30 days, what else could I accomplish????