NaNoWriMo Year 8

Today is November 20th, meaning that National Novel Writing Month is 2/3rds of the way over.

I wrote my first novel when I was 13. I’d never written anything but short pieces of fanfiction, and I didn’t know anything about writing. But, it seemed like a good idea. I sign up for the adult program, meaning that 50,000 words was my non-negotiable goal. Somehow I decided on writing about a dragon and a llama. I stole all of my character names from things I was interested in at the time (one trio of characters were named Alfred, Arthur and Francis, and another trio was Xerxes, Esther and Haman).

I didn’t have a laptop at the time, but my dad had an old desktop that he’d installed Puppy Linux on that I took for my room. I had solitaire, but no internet capabilities. Somehow, I wrote 50,000 words that month, but I hadn’t quite finished my story. I took a break on December 1st, and then over the next three or four days wrote about 10,000 more words so that I could finally type “The End” for the first time.

That was seven years ago, and I’ve been doing it every year since. I’ve only “failed” once, my third year, and I’m determined to never do it again.

I have to admit to daydreaming about being a published novelist over the years. When I actually think about what I’ve written and how bad I perceive it to be, I think, ‘Yeah, like that’s going to happen.’ I haven’t been known to be the most consistent writer. In fact, November has historically been the only month that I’ve dedicated a decent amount of time to original fiction. I may not be cut out for being a money-making novelist. Then again, most people don’t publish books they wrote when they were teenagers, so maybe there’s hope for me yet.

This year I started out with a clearer plan than I’ve probably ever had before. That’s because I started plotting this story years ago, with the idea that it would be a webcomic. My brother and I came up with the idea joking about a game mechanic from Age of Empires 3, and it all spiraled out of control from there. It’s not a very serious story, in a world where humans and intelligent (“intelligent”) birds live together twenty years after a a destructive human-emu war, and dragons manage mobile banks that run from their customers.

I like that it’s a little silly, though. It feels like I’m finally getting back to the whimsy of my first novel, which I still say is the greatest book I ever wrote. Maybe the eighth book I write will finally give Llama Soup a run for its money.

And if not, there’s always the ninth.