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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!
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Nano Judgment Day
I write a novel a year. None have ever been published.
Why? Because they’re my National Novel Writing Month novels. During the month of November, the goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel (roughly 1667 words a day). At the end you get the satisfaction of knowing you wrote… a whole bunch of words.
I’m doing it again this month and I’m terribly behind on my word count. This has been a pattern for the last, oh, let’s say 7 years. So instead of writing tonight like I should, I thought I’d revisit all of my Nano novels and take a trip down memory lane to see which, if any, are actually salvagable.
Ready to jump into the dung pile with me? Good.
2011 – My first Nano. I wrote 3,000 words based on a dream I had. Water was killing people dead. The dream was better. I quit. Verdict: A tiny heap of dung.
2012 – My first successful Nano. It was about half-vampires (yawn) and I did horrible things to most of my characters. At the end of the novel, I realized that a 12-year-old girl got away with nothing bad happening to her so I made her eat a cat. This was the best-written scene in the book. Verdict: Still might keep the cat part.
2013 – I came up with an idea of a B-movie actress aging out of the business and saving a small town in Louisiana from an ancient evil. This was probably my best work to date although I don’t write in a straight line so there are scenes everywhere. Verdict: We can rebuild it.
2014 – This one involved a writer’s characters coming to life or…something. I got to 50,000 by rewriting the opening scene hundreds of times. There are also several paragraphs devoted to my hair. Verdict: It’s dead, Jim.
2015 – Swamps! Louisiana! Sirens! No, not the blaring kind, the kind that lure young men to a watery death. This one was a lot of fun although I can’t figure out why I had two Nano novels set in Louisana. I actually have to visit there someday. Verdict: Could use some seasoning. C’est tout.
2016 – I didn’t learn from my first half-vampire mishap so I wrote them again. Half vampires form an AA group to stop drinking blood. The idea was good but the main character was so dull I might as well have named him Blandie McBlandovich. Verdict: Put a stake in it. It’s done.
2017 – Two goody two-shoes find each other and then decide not to be good anymore. I lost the plot but it was still fun when someone at a write-in was crying over killing a character in their novel while I had one of mine brutally hack up another. Verdict: Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?
2018 – Ghosts get together to solve a mystery. I didn’t finish. This is the first Nano since 2012 I didn’t win. I hated everything about it and if it was possible to kill ghosts, I would have found a way. Verdict: Sometimes, dead is betta’.
2019 – Movie monsters are invading a book store. That’s all you need to know. This is my first Nano novel written in the first person unless you count that unfortunate incident where I wrote two chapters in the third person because consistency IS FOR THE WEAK. Verdict: It’s on life support but still could pull through. We’re monitoring the situation carefully.
So that’s my Nano adventure and while most of these are headed for the dung pile, there are a couple that might serve as fertilizer from which flowers bloom. Just no more half-vampires. But then again… 🤔