NaNoWriMo

It's November, and November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. I've been curious to participate for years--the goal is to hammer out 50,000 words in one month--but I've always been too busy or lazy or skeptical. There are many who deride NaNoWriMo because it produces shoddy work, because some people seem to think a month is enough to really write a novel, because... I'm not sure of all the becauses. And really, I don't care. NaNoWriMo is what you make of it, and this year, I'm making something. A novel? Probably not. But a really thorough set of character sketches and outline for a novel? That might be closer. Which isn't to say I'm not attempting to make this thing read like a novel, but as I push through the words (I've got just above 14,000 here on day eight), I find dozens of things I want to go back and correct, but can't if I want to keep moving forward. So I allow for that and just sort of keep writing with the new idea in mind, and make a note of my new concept. Sometimes I go for pages and pages without writing a scene, or anything scenic at all; it's easy to get swept away in exposition. But it's good I've got that exposition down so I can sift through it when I come back to this thing.