November is now over, and with it, I am free of National Novel Writing Month once more.
This was my seventh year participating. I’ve won every year except one (my third). I never end up going back to edit what I’ve written, or even to re-read it at all. I’m always pretty sure it’s some of the worst writing I’ve ever done, and that going back through it would be painful.
But this year, I did things a little differently. When I was about 14, I made an online friend through a roleplaying community, and at one point we decided to roleplay with two original characters we’d created. Mine was a college student majoring in computer science. Hers was an alien musician. Somewhere along the line, we came up with an alternate universe where our characters were a knight and a dragon, respectively, and began roleplaying that story separately. As it turns out, that’s the one that stuck.
My novel wasn’t really about either of those characters, for the most part. But it was set in that universe, in the past. The idea was to write an epistolary novel that would tell an important story in the history of that universe, which would then be read by my knight (or, ex-knight. He’s a mage now.).
So, while I was writing, and jumping between 2-3 different timelines, the document I was writing in was shared with my friend, and she could read what I was writing every day. This is normally not a thing I would ever do, but how could I keep all those words that vaguely have something to do with her character away from her? While I was writing this, she was writing a separate piece about our characters a little bit earlier in their journeys. All of this was a little bit complicated, but I had a good time.
I didn’t finish the storyline I set out to write, unfortunately. I don’t have a good track record with finishing incomplete stories once November is over. But maybe this will be the year.
I also organized (in a very loose sense of the word) write-ins for the homeschooled kids in Abu Dhabi that I convinced to do NaNoWriMo with me. We had around 7-10 kids at most meetings, which was very exciting to me. There is no Abu Dhabi region on the NaNoWriMo website, or even a UAE region, so last year I got desperate and got some other people I knew to write with me. I don’t plan on being in Abu Dhabi around this time next year, but I hope someone else will keep it going. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and I get very excited about kids trying to write. I first started doing this at 13, so when I see other 13-year-olds willing to give it a try, I can’t help but want to cheer them on as loudly as possible.
Anyway. Yesteray I slept about half the day. Today is National Day, and there are UAE flags everywhere. I have a lot to do in the next couple of months, and no more novel-related excuses for not doing them. So hopefully from now on I’m going to be pretty busy.
I will leave you with a picture of First Lady Dolley Madison as a cat.
Daisy M. Hall 