Writing a novel in a month isn’t that easy.
I am moving ahead with the novel, with 11,461 words on paper.
That leaves 38,539 to go in 14 days to win the challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month as part of National Novel Writing Month.
Can I piece this piece of literature together in time?
Or will I get left in pieces?
Those are the questions.
“Real. That’s what that says, real.”
We’re sat out on the porch in Pinamar and my six-year-old daughter is drawing and writing in her notebook while her younger brother and sister play in the garden with four-ton, the dog. The six-year-old stops and looks up at me and says, “How do you spell real?” I help her spell it out and she writes it down, first once and then a second time. I can hear her sounding out the word as she writes it.
“What are you writing?” I ask.
“My Father Christmas list.”
“What’s the real for?”
“I put it after jewelry and camera, to make sure Father Christmas knows that I want real jewelry and a real camera.”
“Oh,” I think.
I am going to do it. I am going to try to write a novel in a month.
If I didn’t already write enough words in the day as a journalist, I’ve taken on the challenge of writing a novel in a month. It isn’t really a novel idea. More than 100,000 people have signed up for National Novel Writing Month with the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel from scratch by midnight November 30. That’s 1,667 words a day. As of day two, I am at 1,284 with another 2,000 or so scribbled in notebooks and on scraps of paper, carefully kept out of the reach of kids and animals.
Can I do it?
The synopsis (so far) is:
Evan Donnoley is a young reporter and even younger husband. His wife is pregnant and Evan has a bright idea. He’s going to make a documentary about having a baby, even against his wife’s protests. What he discovers with his camcorder is more than he bargained for and this will turn his life upside down.
Intriguing? A sleeper?
At the pace of this challenge, who knows?
What may be certain is that I will probably wind up strung out on mescaline, cannabis and whiskey like Raoul Duke out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or turn dangerously inward and start writing line after line after line of the same thing like Jack Torrance in The Shining. Watch out kids!
Or maybe I’ll come out of this as the next Hunter S. Thompson or Stephen King?