Six days remain

Six days of October remain. That is six days until I begin my new novel "Photographic Visions", with the basic goal of 50,000 words in November for Nano. I've won it twice in my life, in both 2002 and 2011. I've started several other efforts but the closest I got was about 7500 words in 2012 before I realized it was difficult with a full-time job that occasionally had overtime as well.

That being said, I either make it or I don't when it comes to my Nano writing. I don't have an "almost" book where I have 45,000 words and suddenly run out of gas. Either I get to the goal of 50,000 or fail early in the effort. I've written two other books whose length would qualify them for the reward, but they were written over longer periods of time and thus do not have that Nano luster that comes from writing 50,000 words in a single month.

At first glance, the amount of writing seems cumbersome. Even if you break it down, it's 1,667 words a day. That's seven (double-spaced) pages a day, or as long as an essay you might write as a college freshman. I'm sure many of us as college students have written those seven-page (or longer) essays in a single evening or even before a class if it was later in the day and we had a significant gap, but this is writing 30 of those essays every day for a month.

Except they're not essays... it's one book. Though I suppose you could write 30 loosely-connected short stories for Nano and still win with that strategy. For me however I prefer to write longer works with nothing other than occasional viewpoint shifts to change the story. I'd like to believe I have a lot of ideas for my new story that can carry me to 50,000 words.

But so far I don't know if I have much. I have written maybe 150-200 words of "character sketches" and I don't have any chapter outlines or anything of that nature. I'm not a huge planner when it comes to my novels. I tend to just start writing with maybe a few character outlines. I don't have long flowcharts or verbose character descriptions to assist me.

I do enjoy writing, and I think this could be a good one. I think instead of being done for a while after writing my Nano, I should keep writing new books. I've had the same five books on Kindle for the past 23 months, and it's time for a change!

As always, I thank you for reading this blog. I imagine the only views will come from my Facebook and perhaps Google+ but I hope people begin reading this "author" blog of mine. Eat some burgers and be yourselves!