NaNoWriMo

I started writing when I was 12 years old. It was a story I wrote as a school assignment, and my teacher gave our books a cover and sewed the pages in. It was like having a published book. Granted, it was awfully written and illustrated, since I illustrated the book myself and drawing is not a talent I have ever claimed. But for a 12-year-old, the experience and the story were perfect. 

​
​I’ve come a long way since that first story. Writing for me has always been an escape. A way to leave this world behind and go off to explore magical places, to meet amazing people, and to just be someone else for a little while. My childhood was rife with turbulence, and being able to go somewhere else was often appealing. I wrote in journals and jotted ideas down with pen and paper. That’s what you did when you were a kid before the internet existed.

When I was in college, word processor typewriters made it possible to print my stories, but I was—and still am—a terrible typist. Fun fact: Typing was the only class I ever failed. To this day, I type with my index fingers, my middle fingers, and my thumbs, all the while staring at the keyboard to make sure I hit the correct letters. It was not the way I was taught to type, but I’ve typed over two million words with these six fingers, and I’m okay with that.

When personal computers became popular, I bought one and wrote more often. I think I still have a journal that I typed out back then. The problem is, the file is saved on a 3.5” disk, and how do you play that nowadays? Back then, I rarely shared my stories with anyone, figuring others would find them either remedial or ridiculous. The aforementioned turbulent childhood left me with some self-confidence issues. Anyway, I wrote the stories that I wanted to read, and they were my treasures to keep. It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized stories weren’t meant to stay hidden. They’re meant to be experienced by as many people as possible. And who knows how much one story might change the world?

​Many years later, I got married to a wonderful man who was, and still is, an editor. It was actually his waking me from a dream that inspired me to pick my hobby of writing back up. I wanted to know how the dream ended, so I wrote a book about it. That book was the third novel I wrote, and I’m in the process of updating it and rereleasing it under my new publishing company. Feel free to read an excerpt of chapter one.

The first official novel that I wrote was terrible. Just ask my husband, who was the one who edited and helped me make it better. By this time, the internet was fully established, and I was able to easily look up information about maybe officially publishing the book. In the end, we decided that self-publishing was the way to go. In the process of searching the web about publishing a novel, I discovered that November is National Novel Writing Month.

The second novel I wrote was during my first NaNoWriMo participation in 2009. Taking part in it helped me focus on setting word-count goals. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. There are 30 days in the month, so that means I’d achieve my goal if I wrote at least 1,667 words every day. That didn’t seem so hard, and most times it hasn’t been. Words tend to come easily for me once I get my mind focused on a book. I don’t have any trouble starting a book. I rarely have trouble ending one. I tend to write series of books, so most of my endings are soft endings, as I call them. They end the book, but not the story. So my stories can go on for a long time.

“The end of THE END is the best place to begin THE END, because if you read THE END from the beginning of the beginning of THE END to the end of the end of THE END, you will arrive at the end.”
― Lemony Snicket, The End
​

I have written several novels that are standalone, meaning the end of the book is the end of the story. These tend to make me sad, though, because I don’t like letting my characters go. I get attached to my characters, who, to me, are as real as the people I meet at the supermarket. I have conversations with them, or, more realistically, I voyeuristically listen in on their conversations, occasionally rudely butting in and offering my opinion. I often have multiple conversations involving my characters swirling around my head at any given time. It’s honestly a miracle that I haven’t gone mad as a hatter.

​That first novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo was Visions of Murder. I recently revised and rereleased the book under my new publishing company. The digital and paperback versions are available on Amazon. The hardcover is forthcoming. Amazon threw a challenge my way when I found out it limited self-published hardcovers to 550 pages. That meant getting creative to squeeze in the 699 pages I had in my manuscript. Have I mentioned that my stories tend to go on for a long time?

I realized after writing my first novel that I needed to make the characters a little more like me, or at least more like real people. To do that, I began adding just a bit of my personality into each character. Now when I create a character, I create his or her entire life. How else can you create a person you know as well as you know yourself? Still, some of my characters can be demanding, and I have to be willing to take them in a direction I wasn’t planning to. When that happens, I have to be able to realistically write how my character would react, or what he or she would say in a given situation, or why the character would behave in a specific manner, or even why the character is the way he or she is today. Xander Bruinski, the main male protagonist in Visions of Murder, is probably the one character of mine who is most like me, in terms of personality, anyway.
 
Adding these traits to my characters was difficult for me at first. It’s hard to open up and put a little part of myself into the characters of my novels. It made me feel vulnerable. But it has to be done if the story is going to be honest. As Neil Gaiman said in his Masterclass, putting yourself out there is akin to walking down the street naked.

​I’ve participated in nearly every NaNoWriMo since that first year. I’ve missed a few, but I do try to take part every year. As I mentioned earlier, I tend to write longer stories. I’ve actually never finished a novel with only 50,000 words. I think my smallest novel is around 80,000 words. Of course, there’s no punishment if I can’t get to the 50,000 mark by November 30. The goal is self-imposed. Either way, when I get to the end of the month, I just keep writing until I get my first draft done.

This year, I’m planning to write Book 2 in my Chronicles of Arkainia series. This series has been fun to write. When I got the idea to write the first book, it was way outside my comfort level. I’d started out writing contemporary romance books. My characters sometimes had extra senses or abilities that made them interesting, but they were still human. Then I had a dream that got me trying my hand at paranormal romance as I created a society of werewolves. That was still okay. They were basically half-human. Then another dream later, I added demons and fairies. Then later on, elementals. Still, okay. They were more or less humanoid most of the time.
 
But then I came across the image of an alien by a very talented artist, and my mind went to the very uncomfortable place of writing about another race on another planet. That opened a can of worms that had me creating planets, people, languages, history, and mannerisms of people who were unlike anything I was familiar with. Even with all those challenges, I think the first book, Blood Bound, turned out well. It’s been my bestselling book so far, so I suppose others agree. The second book, Blood Born, will continue the story where the first one left off. I'm uncertain, at this point, how many books will be in the series. I suppose there will be as many as I need to finish telling the story. Have I mentioned that my stories tend to go on for a while?

I think we need stories in the world. Stories help us relate. Even though my books are works of fiction, they seem real enough to me, and that matters. No, the characters don’t actually exist. The situations I put my characters in never happened. The places I write about are ones you generally won’t find on any map. And though I feel a little like Slartibartfast in creating an entire alien world, the planet of Arkainia doesn’t exist.

But even though the characters, situations, and often the places don’t really exist, the stories I tell are real. The struggles my characters go through are real. The emotions they feel—and evoke in the reader—are real. That’s the most amazing thing about being a storyteller. I get to create something real from something unreal and share it with the world.
 
That amazing feeling is something I want everyone to experience. I encourage anyone who has ever given thought to a literary idea to make that thought a reality. Every year I put a post out on social media imploring everyone to participate in NaNoWriMo with me. I offer any assistance I’m able to give to help others facilitate their dream of wring, whether it be a book of memoirs, a book of poetry, or even a book of bad jokes. And I do that because the world needs stories. We have enough reality. What we need is a little magic.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats
​