What Happened to November?

So some of you may be wondering how I did with NaNoWriMo last month.

And some of you may be wondering: What is a NaNoWriMo? And is it contagious?

(image from laughstub.com)

Well, November is National Novel Writing Month, and the challenge is to write a fifty-thousand word novel in thirty days. I didn’t exactly make the 50,000 word mark.

Would you like to know my final word count on the deadline, November 30th at midnight?

13,461.

I guess it’s over one-fourth of the way there….

I know, right? LAME.

There were several obstacles in my way. (And I’m not talking JUST about those five obstacles whom I birthed myself!)

For one thing, my plot just wasn’t going very far. Here’s a good way to describe it, as written by Chris Baty about his own novel:

“My NaNoWriMo novel this year was

not quite what I'd hoped.

The idea seemed great in October.

I pictured my story rocketing across November

like a cheetah, flying through the

fertile grasslands of my imagination

and leaping over everything in its path.

Instead, my book bumbled around

like a myopic sasquatch in an overgrown forest,

knocking into pine trees and spending

a fair amount of time wondering if

boiled moss could work as a coffee substitute.”

I feel your pain, Chris!

Also, there’s the problem of the death of naptime.

The Day That Naptime Died.

I think that sounds like a song.

Everybody sing! “Bye Bye! My alone time died! Since the twins escaped their cribs, on all my time they have dibs. And I spend half the day stuck in the car with my kids, since the day… that naptime… died.”

(Click here if you’re interested in reading more about the demise of naptime.)

Anyways, having the twins awake ALL DAY LONG has really thrown a monkey wrench into my writing career.

Is that the right expression? Or is it “a spanner in the works of my writing?”

Or perhaps it’s “a wad of dried Play-Doh clogging my keyboard so I CAN‘T EVEN TYPE?” (I think we’re getting warmer!)

In any case, my novel is going very slowly. But that’s okay!

In the immortal words of Dory, “Just keep swimming! Just keep swimming! Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming!”



Yes. I’ve been watching WAY too much kids’ TV…

(image from disney.wikia.com)