Leap In The Dark

Just what the heck is NaNoWriMo Notes anyway? Good question! Well it's really quite simple actually. Last November, 2005, I participated in an event called the National Novel Writing Month competition, or NaNoWriMo as it's affectionately known. The goal of said contest is to write 50,000 words in a month while retaining your sanity.

Because I didn't consider that enough of a challenge (I'm not known for my rational thinking sometimes) I decided it would be a fun thing if I were to publish a sporadic journal of the event as part of my daily blog. Every week or so, I would publish an instalment at Blogcritics.org, here at my own site and latter parts of the series under the name of "Writer's Notebook" at Desicritics.org.

Now obviously 50,000 words do not a novel make, and when I reached the end of November with nearly 80,000 words under my belt I decided to keep going with the project – both the novel and the journal. What that means is the original "Notes" turned into something far different than what I had originally anticipated.

Instead of simply being an accounting of the events of the contest, it turned into something far more introspective and soul searching. I did my best to avoid navel gazing as much as possible, and keep it more as a record of the process involved in preparing a novel for publication. Sure there are times when I spill my guts about frustrations and anxieties, but that's part of the experience for most people involved in a creative process.

NaNoWriMo Notes as it stands isn't even the end of the story. Right now the book under discussion sits in the hands of a publisher, and I sit at home waiting to hear what the editor has to say about it. This is my first attempt at self-publishing a full length novel of any kind; I have some smaller items for sale along with this at my storefront on Lulu.com; a couple of books of poetry, some small articles and reviews, and the serialization of the first fourteen chapters of an unfinished novel tentatively titled The Trees Were Singing

Thanks for stopping by, and if by some chance you happen to buy the book, do let me know what you think of it by leaving a comment here or back at the main page of the site.