This year's participation in NaNoWriMo is my best ever -- I never fell behind, often staying at least a full day ahead, and I finished with plenty of time to spare. In fact, not only did I cross the 50,000-word finish line in time, I actually finished the first draft of the novel before the end of November.

I've defined a bit of a schedule for the novel I am now writing for NaNoWriMo and it looks like this:

Nov. 1 - Begin writing novel [done]
Nov. 10 - finish first four chapters, hand off as a set to readers [almost done]

As NaNoWriMo 2009 approaches, I'm trying to get ready for a shift in story focus. Since 2006, I've mostly set older novel projects aside and have been very focused on one particular story line, which I started for NaNoWriMo 2006 and expanded (backward in time) for NaNoWriMo 2008. However, I really want to participate in Script Frenzy, and I have a screenplay concept in mind already. My schedule didn't allow participating in Script Frenzy in 2009, so I thought a good way to approach it would be to solidify the story by writing a short novel (60K words or so) for NaNoWriMo 2009.

I like words. I think that's pretty obvious, given the "wordy" nature of my site, and considering how many words I've written just for the fun of it. Not only do I like reading and writing words, I like learning new words, and learning how words we use today came about (some rather suddenly from "pop culture" and others with a long history of evolution). I even like the word for "the history of a word" -- etymology.

After taking far too long (during which, to be honest, most of the time the project was left untouched on a back burner), I finally completed the eBook, had it reviewed by a small but very helpful group of readers, and set it up for sale. It's published by my small business and is currently sold exclusively through ClickBank. Take a look at Take Five! for Better Photos to see the culmination of this project. You can even promote it as an affiliate and earn more than I do on sales credited to you!

If you've never tried out wordle.net, you should give it a try! And if you're a writer, it's quite fun to try pasting in some of your work to see what comes of it. For example, the one shown below is from my short story Tramp Avatar (available on my personal site).

As I was driving home this evening, I was thinking about dedications. I've thought a lot about dedications in the past, it's one of the things I look forward to being able to do, i.e., putting out for the world to see that I value a certain person (or my memory of them, if they're deceased). But -- of course -- this requires that a book actually be published, since a dedication note on a private manuscript isn't exactly telling the world anything.

Despite getting off to a particularly bad start, marred by crime, I managed to win NaNoWriMo this year. Color me happy! Not only did I make it past the 50,000 word mark, I also finished the first draft; that's the first time I've completed a novel's first draft in many years. Far too long. I'd forgotten how good it feels. (That just shows I'm not a professional author of novels. Yet. And probably never will be.)

More news later, must catch up on some sleep!

So I decided to do NaNoWriMo this year after all, as I mentioned here. But, as I also mentioned at that linked page, the actual launch of the event this year was, for me, marred by the fact that our house was the target of repeated vandalism just hours before. With the kids upset and with me on high alert for any additional trouble from the local morons, thoughts about writing a novel were on a distant back shelf.

I'd really like to take the NaNoWriMo challenge again this year. It was fun when I did it in 2006, and I ended up with a solid start on a novel that I really like -- I like the story and I like the potential that I think it has for sales. Despite my temptation, though, I'm not going to do NaNoWriMo this year, because I still haven't finished that novel I started in 2006. Maybe I should fork over $20 for Finish Your Novel, eh?