NaNoWriMo!

I have two essays of two thousand words each to write for Tuesday. I have completed zero words. Therefore I have decided, in true student style, that the best course of action is to sit here drinking coffee, eating a raisin and cinnamon bagel, and talking about NaNoWriMo on my blog.

For those of you who don't know what NaNoWriMo is, it's National Novel Writing Month - a competition that challenges you to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. The website is www.nanowrimo.org. And I am doing it this year...

Wahey! I didn't exactly intend to sign up for NaNo this year. I was very tempted, because I did it in '06 and found it was a great way to force me to write when I didn't really want to, and I managed to produce something vaguely readable out of it. However, I knew this year was probably the worst year ever to do it because my degree actually counts this year. Anyway, I signed into my '06 account just to see if it still existed - and was told that I was now an offical participant! Well, that was that decided then.

My NaNo this year is called Bethany's Tree. It's a weird sort of spiritual/fantasy/literary mess of a novel which I have barely planned. I'm a bit worried that the idea just isn't going to work and it'll all be a massive disaster. The basic premise is that my protagonist, Bethany, is mentally handicapped and trapped in this drab middle-class life in the country. While everyone assumes she is stupid, dim-witted and trapped inside her own restrictive mind, she actually has an incredible imagination, and the novel is about her journeys into a beautiful fantasy world reached by a tree in her garden (whether this world is real or imagined by her, even I don't know). Each chapter will switch between the real world, where her family are preparing for the Dinner Party, the biggest social event of the year, and her adventures in the tree world. And then at the end everything goes horribly wrong, but I won't reveal too much.

Yeah, it sounds weird. I have no idea whether I will pull it off. I've never been that into planning, as anyone who has read Storm Awakened will know, and I just intend to wing it as I go along. But I guess that's what NaNoWriMo is all about, isn't it?

The competition starts on Sunday. There's still time to sign up. It's hard but very fun, and if you have lots of coffee and chocolate to help you out it's very possible too. I'd recommend it to anyone who has always fancied writing a novel but never got around to it!