And So It Begins!

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) starts today! I'm very excited to get going. I have my novel plotted out and a character list ready. Still don't have a title, but don't really need one yet. This will probably be my last blog post for awhile, and I'll be absent from my other social networking while working on getting 50,000 words written in 30 days!

My background is in journalism, and as a newspaper reporter I was trained to work under a deadline. NaNo is right up my alley in that regard. I may not finish my novel this month, but I will get the 50,000 words written, and that has me excited. Will this be a novel I publish? Who knows. I just like the exercise of writing like this for one intense month. It's challenging, it pushes me, and I think it sharpens the grey cells.

An author I admire greatly, L.J. Sellers, has the philosophy of "write first, clean later." This is the perfect situation for that. Write. Just write. If you have a good story, then over the next several months you can clean it up, edit, rewrite, make it the way it needs to be. I've found that the creative process of  writing is really a very small part of it. Most of getting a book out is rewriting and editing, formatting and marketing.

So, since this is a month of almost nothing much but creating, I am anxious to get to work. It's the part of being an author that is the most fun.

Join me, if you like. I would be happy to be your writing buddy should you decide to participate in NaNoWriMo. And if you do, enjoy it. Don't stress about it. It's basically 1,600 words a day. Easy to achieve. If there's a part of you that's always wanted to write a book, boot up the computer, open a blank page, and do it!