NaNovember, NaNoCashland

Yesterday was the first day of a global writing fiesta/orgy/spasm called National Novel Writing Month  (NaNoWriMo for short, NaNo for short short). NaNo works like this: you register on their website – over 100,000 people have registered around the world this year -- and commit to writing a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and November 30. 50,000 words comes out to roughly 200 pages, or between 6 and 7 pages per day, which in turn translates to an average of 1667 words per day. Simple, right?

Simple. Not easy.

One of the great joys of No Cashland is that I had ZERO excuse not to participate this year, and so I’m in for the first time. I will continue to post here throughout the month, but as I’m doing most of my heavy-lifting writing over at NaNo, you might wind up seeing a lot of links. And videos. Jokes, maybe. Who knows?  In the meantime, to give you a taste of who I’ll be cheating on you with all month, here’s the first paragraph of the NaNo novel. (This is the only excerpt I’ll post, though I may post a summary or two if they seem worth reading. Or because it might be fun to write them.)

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Chapter One: To the Mountain

The carriage rocked and swayed as it lurched up the mountain. The horses strained at their harnesses; the breeze carried intermittent flecks of sweaty foam from their backs into the compartment where Edith sat next to her seven-year-old brother Peter. It was a clear, sunny afternoon, but their parents knocked on the inside roof of the compartment and asked the driver — Timothy was their gardener for the nine months of the year they were in the city and their driver/groundskeeper/in-house naturalist when they journeyed to Cragsmoor — to close the curtains against the flecks. As the carriage trudged upward its shiny black body and thick black woolen curtains made it look more like a hearse than a family vehicle.
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That’s right, it looked like a hearse. Foreshadowing! People might die! (Okay, people die.) A century later other people will try to find out how and why and it will put them in danger! Some other stuff will happen in between those events! At this point I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen, but when I started writing chapter one I had a very clear plan. That plan exploded on word two, which I had intended to be “car.” Being in a carriage instead of a car sent me back half a century in one fell swoop, to a time period I hadn't envisioned being in this book at all. I fought it for about 20 minutes and then gave in.  Which I expect will happen a lot between now and November 30.  Basically, I expect to spend November being smacked around by my own brain.

At least, I hope so.