NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month has arrived once again, and this time, I am determined to conquer it. My previous two tries, one during sophomore year of high school and the other during college, were met with abject failure due to poor scheduling and general time constraints.

I realized during college that I would never have enough time during the month of November to write a novel, what with exams, papers, and life all getting in the way. (This did not stop several of my fellow Swatties from winning NaNoWriMo, however. Just me. Because I'm weak.) So, I decided that I would put the endeavor off until the year after college, when I would presumably not have to write any more papers and be free to write nothing but 50,000 words of fiction and fantasy for thirty days.

But then Fulbright happened, and I now have a full-time job that has me correcting hundreds of really poorly written essays until the wee hours of the morning. And then I signed up to take the GRE on the 25th. So I realized another thing: I still probably can't do NaNoWriMo. At least not on my own.

And then a wonderful thing happened. I teamed up with my friend Sara, who writes a lot, and we hatched a brilliant ploy to win NaNoWriMo together by co-authoring a story about recent college grads figuring out post-graduate life in an unspecified city on the East Coast of the United States. We will write alternating chapters told from different characters' points of view, and they may or may not meet at some point in the story. Not everything is planned out yet (in fact, almost nothing is planned out yet), but it will be interesting to watch the story and characters grow along the way. NaNoWriMo is supposed to be a reckless writing frenzy, anyway, and bringing a friend along for the ride is an awesome choice, in my opinion.

Is it even allowed? I don't know, but that's beside the point. This will be a fun project for November. In fact, I've already started: I had a blast with my first 2,000 words, and I even conjured up a rudimentary plan of the unspecified city. NaNoWriMo will be a good way to fill in random free hours between classes when I don't have to lesson plan. Plus, I'm justifying the time I'll spend on writing as practice for the GRE. Yes, GRE vocab will be sprinkled throughout my writing, like chocolate chips in a loaf of banana bread. Mmm, delicious vocabulary.

If you're doing NaNoWriMo, please let me know! Sara and I will need accountability buddies and friends off of whom to bounce ideas!

Here we go!