13,142

That's how many words I have written for National Novel Writing Month. And since I haven't done anything exciting in the last 24 hours to write about instead, I'm going to talk about writing a book in a month.

First of all, it's hard! I'm trying to get up early and write before work. Despite how very, very difficult it is for me to drag my lazy ass out of bed in the morning, I find that if I can manage it, I'm more productive then than I am in the evenings. And since I can't always be guaranteed a slow day at work in which to novel, forcing myself to become an early riser seems like my best chance for success.

I'm also really intrigued by how organic this process is. National Novel Writing Month focuses exclusively on quantity and output. There is no quality control and the NaNoWriMo powers-that-be actively encourage writers not to edit at this point. As they say, that's what December is for. Because I'm striving for a lot of mediocre writing instead of a smaller amount of polished, thoughtful prose, my novel is progressing in unexpected ways. I'm following tangents and writing disembodied scenes without any connective tissue. I'm surprised at which parts are coming very naturally and which characters refuse to materialize, regardless of how central they're supposed to be. My protagonist is a mere specter, while secondary characters' back stories are flowing right out of me.

And finally, I'm grateful for the friends going through this with me. Sharing all my bad writing on a regular basis--and seeing what others are coming up with, too--creates a feeling of accountability and much-needed motivation for me. It would be easy to give up if I were doing this in isolation (as most writers work all the time), and I'm glad to have the moral support of my fellow NaNoWriMo-ers.