A Nano Rebel Without a Clue

It’s National Novel Writing Month again, where the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. And if you’d like to see how awful my past attempts have been, feel free to read last year’s post.

However, this year I’m doing something different. This year I’m rebelling.

Yeah, I’m what is known as a “Nano Rebel”. Instead of writing 50,000 words of a novel, I’m doing my own thing cause I’m an outcast who doesn’t have to conform to society’s rules, man.

I took a look at the word dumps of Nano Novels Past and saw 5 books that were terrible, but maybe a bit salvageable. Which wasn’t like finding a diamond in a lump of coal, more like stumbling across cubic zirconia in a pile of dung.

So I decided to edit 5 of my past novels at once. It sounds stupid, it probably is, but here’s the thing. It’s going GREAT! I’m not going to lie, I never seem to bring myself to edit a novel. It’s not bright, shiny, new or interesting like fresh words are. But editing 5 novels at once makes my brain happy. When I get bored or stuck with one, I just move to another. It’s practical. Well, that and the fact that I have the concentration span of a hyperactive puppy.

And speaking of short attention spans, when one is writing 50,000 words in a month, one usually…adds some things that enhance word count Also, I’m not a linear writer – at all. So considering all 5 of these novels were written during Nano, I’ve found some things that were a little unusual, including:

• Whole paragraphs devoted to the state of my hair.
• Characters that changed ethnicity half-way through the novel and then back again.
• Three different endings written about 1/3 of the way through a novel and the beginning written at the end.
• A word-for-word transcript of someone nearby who was talking with a friend about Harry Potter and the mistreatment of elves.
• A scene in one book with a man with a whip and an ogre. I’ve never had either of those things in anything I’ve written so I have no idea where it came from. And I don’t write fantasy novels.
• A slew of curse-words far too delicate for this blog (stop laughing) where I pretty much wrote: OHMYGODISUCKASAWRITER %$#! WHYDOIDOTHIS %&(@ IWANTCHOCOLATE.
• That last one happened several times throughout several novels.

A kindly soul on the Nano forums reached out to ask if he could help with my editing, and I had to politely refuse, because I didn’t want to break his brain, but also after reading my unedited novels, he might run to the feds and I might end up on a list somewhere.

So at the end of all this, I might have 5 terrible novels, or at least second drafts with only a few words about my hair. Wish me luck!