I'm on that Strugglebus

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So, as you may or may not know, this month I decided to do NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo, for those who are not writing nerds, is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a novel of fifty thousand words in thirty days, which equals roughly 1,700 word a day.

I'm on the strugglebus.

As it stands, I have 21,315 words, which means that I'm almost 4,000 words behind. I don't know why I thought it would be a good idea to try to balance 16 credits, 8 hours of sleep a night, and 50,000 words; I mean, something's got to give. It's not like I haven't written novels before; if you count my "book" of poems, I am the author of 10 novels (or, at least, manuscripts). But, even when I have a lot of free time, It usually takes me at least two or three months to complete a manuscript. Thirty days? Preposterous!

Clearly, sleep is not going to happen this Thanksgiving break. But actually, when I finish this blog, I'm going to go write 4,000 words.

-_-

I'm not quite sure how I got so far behind. I was on track the first few days; actually, I was ahead. I'm writing a murder mystery, which means that, whenever I run out of things to say, I can be all "who killed him?" "I don't know!" "I think you do!" "blahhh (insert personal drama here)". But there's only limited material you can work with when you haven't actually figured out who the murderer is going to be in your murder mystery and you're almost half way through the book. Yeah, I should probably go work on that.


Fortunately, I know quite a few people who are doing NaNoWriMo. And, I don't mean to brag, but, even though I'm behind, I'm ahead of most of my friends. It's like "oh, you have 21,306 words? I have 21,315 words. For the win!". Let's just pretend that that wasn't the word goal for two days ago...

It's not even a very good 21,315 words. I'm pretty sure I used up two or three thousand words with song lyrics because I made my characters musicians (no! of course I didn't do that on purpose...). I'm just sort of stringing some cliches together with the chorus of American Pie and hoping it makes sense as a novel. The only way it could be worse was if someone besides me was actually going to read it. Wait a minute! Someone besides me is going to read it. My friend and I plan to read our novels out loud on December 1st to show what we have been working on for the past month.

Excuse me while I climb back on that strugglebus.

Just sayin'

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