So, there's this thing called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it is affectionately known and printed on t-shirts). The idea behind it is, you write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I thought it was an intriguing idea (like the 24-hour comic -- I'm a sucker for challenges like that) and made sort of an attempt in 2002, but nothing ever really took off. Then this year, I woke up ridiculously early on the second of November, the morning after our Day of the Dead party. I had only had about three hours of sleep and had no idea why I was awake, but I thought the only thing to do was start writing a novel and see what happened.

What happened was, by the time other people were waking up, I had a general outline and had started writing the first scene. That did it. How could I not make a serious attempt at NaNoWriMo with such a great start?

So I wrote. I figured I had to average 1,667 words a day for thirty days. I found that this amount was pretty easy to do in two hours of writing. So, if I had managed to write every single day, it would have been pretty easy. The hard part was skipping a day. Or two days. Or three days. Suddenly, the word count is a little more difficult to do in one sitting. Plus, I really had to finish the thing on Wednesday, November 26, before leaving town for Thanksgiving.

I kept undoing my own efforts. I tried to do a minimum of editing, since it's not really in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, but I did occasionally have to read through what I'd already written to remember what I'd named people, or where the plot was going. When that happened, I couldn't resist the impulse to polish a bit, which usually meant trimming words (although occasionally it meant adding things). And at one point I realized that a good two or three thousand words were actually the outline, and felt guilty leaving it in as part of the "novel." So I took it out and had to write more words to fill the void.

On November 26 I managed to upload more than 51,000 words, and now I get to put this on my web site:

The challenge is to write at least a sketch of a whole novel -- what I did was write the first "book" of a fantasy, so it doesn't conclude the whole story, just a portion of it. My defense is that fantasies are always three or four or six or ten books, so it's part of the genre.

What did I learn? I learned that I can write conversation faster than anything else, so large portions of the book are just people talking without much attribution or any action. And I learned that a person really can live off peanut butter toast and apples for days at a time.