"One month. 50,000 words." That's part of the mindset behind NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea behind it is that anyone can write a novel, and you can do that within 30 days. The event is held every November, and has been in existence for many years now. There's no real "prize" for doing it, as it isn't an event where you compete against other writers. Instead, you are awarded the title of "winner" if you manage to complete at least 50K words and have that verified by their servers by midnight on November 30th. I've been aware of it for the past eight years, and for the previous seven I kept telling myself I should try it. I have ideas in my head for stories, after all. Then November first would roll around, I'd slack off on it (or forget it existed), and after a couple days I'd give up any ideas toward doing it.
Not this time. Back on November 1, 2017, I undertook the project, and even through a bout of a major cold towards the end, I persevered. By the end of the month, I had clocked in almost 51,000 words, and actually wasn't done yet! I could see that there were plot holes in it, and boy, did it ever need a rework, but after wrapping up the final chapters, I had literally written a book.
Now the fun begins. The editing. I originally wrote the thing using Google Docs, because it was effectively free and I had access to it anywhere I wanted to work on the writing. Unfortunately, Docs, much like Word, doesn't exactly lend itself to long-form writing. It's fiddly to deal with chapters, and trying to move sections of text can potentially pose problems. As such, I'm going to be taking another dip into something new, and learn how to use Scrivener.
Scrivener is a piece of software that was literally designed with writing books in mind. It has a ton of features that make writing easier. The downside of it is that it was originally designed for Macs, so some of the interface is a bit screwy in respect to what most PC users are used to dealing with. I'm going to be installing it and running through some tutorial and training exercises on how to use it, and then once I get that done I'm going to start pulling the scenes and characters into it and try and make some sense of what I've written, while fleshing out the parts that need work and excising the parts that just don't fit. Here goes nothing, it's going to be an adventure.
