Writing a book is one of those things that I can recall wanting to do at some point in my life far before the conception of this blog and our accompanying bucket list. I’ve always thought of myself as a decent storyteller and envisioned that one day I might write something fantastic. The key part of that thought is the “one day.” Many people say they’d like to write a novel sometime in their life but very few people actually go out and do it. For a long time, I was one of those people. Until last month, that is. Now, I’m a novelist.
This man, I am not
I can remember several times in my life when I tried to sit down and actually write a book. The first was when I was young, probably around nine years old, and it was a piece of fiction set in the Zelda universe that lost out to the allure of the summer pool after a few chapters. Then, in high school, I began two different novels. Both times I had an exciting first chapter or two based around some cool ideas that I had but unfortunately I lacked direction for my plots and quickly abandoned the projects. All this time, the memories of those stories started and never realized have tugged at my brain begging me to finish them or to at least start something new that would fulfill the goal of writing a book.
Two years ago, by chance, I stumbled upon something that I knew would finally allow me to accomplish this whimsical dream: a brilliant little contest called National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short. The idea of NaNoWriMo is to pound out a short novel of 50,000 words in the month of November. I was sold hook, line, and sinker. When Amanda and I were creating our bucket list last year, one of the first things I knew had to be on it was to participate in NaNoWriMo and write a novel. I then decided that there was no reason to wait and that 2010 would be the first year that I attempted to write a novel for NaNoWriMo. (more…)
