It's November First

And just about every writer knows what that means....NaNoWriMo!!

I am participating this year for the first time :). I spent just about every November since I found out what NaNoWriMo was making up excuses about why I didn't have time and other yadda yadda , but no more! I have joined the fast foray of scurrying fingers on keyboards for the next month to produce a first draft of my next novel.

My first NaNoWriMo will be spent constructing the sequel to my first finished novel A Servant and Her Princess. I've spent a lot of my time wondering whether that novel was a waste of four years writing. I have only had two dedicated readers. One of these was a professor at my Uni who helped me work through and do the biggest editing job of my life. I used that novel as a Senior Writer At Work project, the final creative writing class credit I needed for my major. However after that, no readers I asked were really biting, so I wondered if I should give up on it. The novel itself needed a sequel to end properly, a sequel I had not written. I went back and forth on whether the endeavor was futile and if I shouldn't even bother finishing it. Why finish something if it was going no where to begin with? As the first approached I decided to use a more recent project as the one to be written this month. I had made my decision, even posting the title, summery and snippet of the story to come on my NaNoWriMo page. And then 15 minutes before November 1st I knew I wasn't choosing the right path. I logged back onto the page I had created 40 minutes ago and edited my new novel info. The story to be written would be the sequel to my first novel. And then I went to bed.

Now why would I write a finish for an already possibly dead end novel? Well, the easy answer is that I'm not going to give up, not ever. I do a fair amount of down talking on my own writing, but I have to admit, no matter all the flaws of my first novel, I love it. I love the characters with their juvenile behavior and the plot with all it's holes, I love it all. It is a flawed thing, but I worked very hard on it and it is the first finished novel generated by me and only me. I learned a whole heck of a lot and both me and it came a long way from the seventeen-year-old who started to write a story she had told her friends for fun.

Yes I want to get published some day. Yes I want my stories to be read and shared by more than me and my friends. But I don't think it is the most important thing anymore. Sure it is a very big life goal, but it isn't everything. The story, my creativity, THAT  is everything to me. As long as I have those things I will always be fine and always carry on. Being published would be great but as I've iterated many times before, there are many authors I have read that are unpublished and absolutely amazing and their writing brilliant. Not being published doesn't mean a damn in the face of the greatness that is their story. So sure, maybe this story and it's sequel won't be published, maybe it will be written and finished just for me, and that is absolutely fine by me. Because I learned so much writing the first, and I think I will learn even more finishing the second.

I have no regrets about my decision. I wrote my first 1751 words (84 over my daily goal!) in less than two hours. Everything just flowed out. I hadn't even really made a concrete plan on where I wanted to go with things, but like the first time, the story just began to happen. I am absolutely sure it is going to get harder every day and I will have many points where I want to give up, but I am still happy with this choice because I feel like this story wants to be written.

I would go on even more on the subject, but it is November 1st and it's time to write!