And so it begins

Today is the first day of NaNoWriMo. Last night I was waiting for midnight with a blank page in front of me, ready to type my opening line. An hour and a couple of thousand words later, I went to bed feeling pleased and also wondering what I had let myself in for. This morning I woke up with an idea about how to change the narration of my "novel" (novella? novelette? screed?) and now I am taking a break having reached six thousand words, more than I had imagined. No aching wrists, sore eyes etc. - I guess because I am used to writing, just not in these quantities on one thing. 

It's a strange idea, and it remains to be seen whether it really works for me or not. At the moment I am very optimistic, which is a good thing seeing as I have another 44K and 29 and a bit days to go with this odd challenge. There's a good atmosphere online in the comprehensive but slow-loading forums; I am not sure what genre I will turn out to be writing in, but small matters like that can wait.

I am signed up for NaNoWriMo 08 - a challenge to write 50,000 words in one month, starting November. The graphic above is my attempt at a banner to summarise some themes from my project.

I only hesitated for a few days before joining, although I only started writing fiction "accidentally" about six months ago and have never written anything like that much in one month. I am hoping this is going to stretch me and my writing, help me commit to some writing (almost) every day, reawaken my creativity, that kind of thing. When I signed up, I had no idea what I would write. At the moment I have two different stories in my head and on my computer about a dystopian future after an ecological and social catastrophe. One of these is a lot more developed than the other, but neither is anywhere near finished even in first draft.

So far, I have written by accumulating scenes as they come to me, with the occasional set of background notes as I think out some issue in my made-up societies, so to look in these NaNoWriMo forums (I nearly typed "fora" but I guess that's way too pretentious) and see advice about outlining and knowing where your plot is going before you start is a whole new way of doing things. To write that much in that short a timespan, I think I am going to have to have more idea about where I am going on a daily basis.