It’s Hallowe’en and the countdown is on to the witching hour when NaNoWriMo begins. Will I be brave enough to set some words down at the break of midnight? Or will I choose to sleep fitfully, knowing a scary 1 667 words are necessary for the first and every day of November till I have completed the challenge?
I know what my regulars are thinking. There just isn’t much tension in NaNoWriMo because I have completed the challenge successfully, 3 times before.
Yes, I bask in the kudos of the last three outings and my eventual success. But wait. This year is different. What I intend to finish are three novellas which should be able to total 50 000 words. There is only one problem. I have already written the first novella some years ago. So I’m not sure that 2 novellas are sufficient to make the 50 000 words. So, again this NaNoWriMo Eve, there is tension and uncertainty.
And yes, for the third time in 4 NaNoWriMos, I am doing the challenge incorrectly. Three novellas make a book, not a novel. Ah well. What follows is my reasoning.
When I first discovered NaNoWriMo, I only heard of the 50 000 words in 30 days. Even though Novel is right there in the title I thought (and was encouraged by my sister Laurel), that the challenge was very much the same as when doing a book of short stories. Only after doing the challenge successfully for those short stories, did I hear about Camp NaNoWriMo and its varied goals to be accomplished.
Even if I knew about Camp NaNoWriMo I might still have opted to do the challenge in November. Why would I try such shenanigans? Well it is quite simple. I have come up with a series of stories which will span 6 books. Two of them are books of short stories that have already had the first draft done through NaNoWriMo. One is this year’s attempt at three novellas (The Invisibility Trio). And three books will be novels. The Interstellar Flit which I have already done the first draft of, and my next two years of entries in NaNoWriMo will be novels. So fully half my books are the accepted novels to be done during NaNoWriMo.
Taking after my first collection of short stories in the series, Fabrications, I have decided to name the six book series The Fabricated Series.
That is all. Or perhaps I should say that will be all in a few years, when my full series is finished.
