At one-minute pass midnight on November 1, 2012, NaNoWriMo
began. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and there are authors
all over the world who participate.
This was my third time participating. The first two years I did not finish. I would start only to tire out or become disgusted with what I was writing. Besides due to being frustrated with the whole challenge, I was unwilling to put in the time and energy one needs to take to complete such a project. I thought I could do a thousand other projects and still meet my goal. That is not possible, at least for me it is not.
So, this year, I planned it differently. Why? I got tired of having a guilty feeling resulting from my not giving NaNo my best shot. Sure, I know NaNo is a fun type of thing, but even in fun, you don't want the joke to be on you, and that is how I felt the first two years after not reaching my goal of 50000 words.
Determined, this time I was going to go all the way, I prepared myself mentally. I informed every person I had built a relationship with, husband, friends, writing groups, and even animals, just kidding about the animals, I was doing NaNo, and would perhaps disappear for some days, but if something significant happen to them that was earth shaking, they could reach me on my computer through email. Having my notifications on, I could see when emails came into my mailboxes without opening up the email.
I had already developed my main characters in my novel and became friends with them. We got to know one another, and I fell in love with them, and I had a topic I wanted my characters to handle. It worked. They are handling the topic wisely. My novel is not yet complete, but I had the word count validated yesterday at 57026 words.
Am I happy? You bet.
NaNo is coming to a close for this year, and I have begun to get back into the flow of writing my own blogs, catching up on blogs I follow, preparing for a singing engagement, and participating in my writing groups.
I truly enjoyed NaNo. Completing it successfully made me aware of a few things about myself, I did not know.
NaNoWriMo comes again next year. Maybe, just maybe, I'll participate once more.
Ciao,
Pat Garcia
