The first time I participated in Nano, it was 2006. I had found out about it from my RWA chapter. My mother had just passed away, and I really didn’t think I could do anything concerning writing. I surprised myself, and went to work and finished that November with somewhere around a 40k word count. It finished a manuscript I had been struggling with for sometime. It proved I could do something like that in a short 30 days of writing, a lot of crap, but it was done and on the screen.

Last year I forgot about the success of the year before. I must have had a laundry list of excuses why I wasn’t doing it again that year. A list I clearly can’t remember, but I know me, and it existed.  I guess repeating success was something I wasn’t interested in. So I let the month pass, and didn’t finish the manuscript. I continued working on it until this year, actually I wrote those two wonderful little words, ‘the end’ around the first of October.

With Nano looming on the horizon, I decided it was time to step up to the plate admit my failings and commit.

Okay, I had learned my lesson. I need something like Nano, or my manuscripts will sit, or be rewritten, dissected and go into mothballs, because I’ve lost my momentum. This whole process takes about a year. Not a good thing for a budding author. It can spell disaster on many levels of a future writing career.

I got the message loud and clear, so on November 1^st, I started to write a completely new story. I’m buzzing along, and now it’s halfway through the month of Nano. Will I do 50k? I don’t know, but this much I do know it will bring this manuscript to at least ¾’s done.

Nano does so much for me. It forces me to face my demons, and put up one big knock-down-drag-out fight with my inner critic, and get her to shut the &*#$^%+ up. I have to blind my editing eye. Preferably not with a sharp object, but there are days… I just have to give myself permission to write a whole lot of carp. But its good crap. Crap that when I reach the end, it can be revised, edited, over the course of —well, lets hope its a short time, so I can be on my way to submitting.  As Karin Tabke reminded me, “You puke it up in those 30 days.”

Not a pleasant analogy, but an effective one.

What all this does for me, is finish the story, for all its good, extremely bad grammar, and ugly sentence structures. Nano forces me to let go and write free style, and get the story done. And because of this very valuable lesson, I have learned this is how I need to write. Just puke it up. Get it done in 30 days, then edit…It works for me.

Woo wee, you should see the red squiggles–it’s frightening.

Question of the Day: If you’re participating in Nano,  has it changed your writing or writing habits?