I’m almost not sure I can believe I’m going to say this out loud (type it out loud? uh…whatever…), but here goes nothing:

I am writing a novel.

It’s Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), which means that nearly 200,000 writers are attempting to write 50,000 words in the month of November.  We hit the halfway point in the month yesterday, and guess what!  I’m a little over halfway through my word count!

Now, you might think that having written 25,250 words, I would be able to tell you how much of the story I have written, but you would be wrong:  because I’m making this crazy thing up as I go along.  And I keep having better ideas, and my characters keep doing things I didn’t expect (or doing them sooner than I had planned), and today, it occurs to me that the character that I thought was my main character might not be the main character, her cousin might actually be the protagonist.  But!  I have no idea, so I’ll keep forging ahead.  It’s not so much a novel as it is a proto-novel.  A novel in it’s rawest form.  A lot of the words are there, but I suspect that many of them are in the wrong order.

Will this story ever make it off my hard drive?  Hard to say.  The goal for me this month is just to see if I can get the words out.  As an avid reader, I’ve often read books and thought “I could do that” or “I could do that BETTER,” but like the millions of other people who think that, I’ve never put in the effort (and believe me, writing an average of 1667 words per day for a month is EFFORT), and lately I’ve been thinking I should really try.  Mark is convinced I’m going to be the next JK Rowling, but…I don’t have any illusions about something like that.  I think it’s probably obvious that I like to make things, and right now, instead of making quilts, apparently my creative energy wants to make words.

Except, I just spent over 300 words on this post, so I better stop before my brain runs out of words that it needs to make up my Nanowrimo daily goal…