NaNoWriMo

I've been MIA from my blog, so I thought I'd drop in and tell you why.

I decided to join the National Novel Writing Month this November. It's something I've always wanted to do, but never thought I had the time. This year I realised that I won't ever feel like I 'have the time' to write a novel. No one does. That's why NaNoWriMo exists in the first place.

The goal is to write at least 50,000 words in a novel during the month of November. That works out to be 1,667 words a day. So for someone with an already full life - a very lot of writing! I'm getting some pretty late bedtimes so far this week.

Here's my NaNo profile on the website if you'd like to learn more about it:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/204442

Now so far when I tell people I'm doing this, they ask about my novel. The short version is that it's a Sci-Fi novel about a ship of 1000 people going off to colonise a new planet. It's a story I was supposed to write 2 years ago. I joined an anthology contest on writing.com about 10 ships that left earth in search of new planets. We wrote a story proposal about what happened to one ship. My story got picked, and I began writing the full story. Then life got in the way and I basically stopped.
Now I'm starting over and using it for my NaNo novel. I don't think I really want the finial version to be 50,000 or more words long, but I'm writing a lot of background and more in depth character stuff that I probably don't really need, so when November is over, I hope to have enough material to edit it down to 20-30,000 words worth of good stuff.

That's the plan.

If you've ever Nano-ed, or are Nano-ing now, let me know! Share your tips for getting through the month - and tell me about your novel!