I’ve talked in these posts about National Novel Writing Month before. What is NaNoWriMo?
NaNoWriMo is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides tools, structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds — on and off the page.
They are an amazing year-round organization, but the buzz mostly happens in November. That’s the month they present the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It’s both harder and easier than it seems. Harder because of the consistency—if I miss three days, I’m playing mad catch-up at the end of the month to meet the 50k mark.
And it’s easier because at first the number FIFTY THOUSAND sounds crazy. Sounds like hours and hours of writing a day. Insurmountable. But it’s 1,666 words a day. Do you know how long you take to write 1,666 words a day? I do now—it takes me about two hours.
Sure, I lose sleep in November—two hours' worth. But the rewards are soooo sweeeet. You get to say you wrote a friggin’ novel. It may be terrible, it may be boring. But it’s yours, you did it, and ain’t no one can take that away from you.
But I want to talk about my personal experience with one particular NaNoWriMo. I’ve mentioned it here before. There’s a December collapse that happens after that much frenetic energy. I’ve done NaNoWrimo several times and every time I go into a year-end hibernation.
And I want to talk about 2019’s challenge—I didn’t make it. I’d written 20,076 words and just stopped. Now, if you know me well, you’ve heard me talk about this 50k word challenge a great deal. You may have even joined me a year or two. So you may have asked me about last year’s challenge. The story I told you, and told myself, was that I lost the characters’ voices. Or I told you I didn’t need to prove I could write 50,000 words. I’d done it several times already. Or I told you I was too busy last year.
But I recently discovered and came to terms with the truth. I couldn’t finish 2019 because of a broken heart. And here’s why:
There it is, still on the website. Waiting for me to pick it up again. “In Progress”—Austin Wellington 2. [ let’s call it AW2 so as not to pad the word count here. Which is perfectly legal for NaNoWriMo’s 50k, btw ;) ]
AW2 is a sequel to Whatever Happened to Austin Wellington?, which was the book I started in November 2017 as Untitled Crime Dame and then I wrote it AGAIN from scratch. I remember calling my friend Geoff, telling him I had to start Untitled Crime Dame over because only after 50,000 words in November 2017 did I then know what the hell the story was.
And the end result? It’s not the best thing anyone’s ever written, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I’ve described it over and over again by saying, “If you don’t like that book…you won't like anything else I have. Whatever Happened to Austin Wellington is everything I know how to do so far.”
So whatever did happen to Austin Wellington?
Not much. She’s been sitting in the back of the proverbial drawer for two years. She broke my heart. I’ve never believed in something as much as I believe in this book.
But after two years of trying to get producers, agents, managers, and publishing companies to read it, it depressed me. It got some attention—some people loved it. A couple people HATED it. But most people forgot they’d asked me to send it to them. She sat in many people’s mail slots and email inboxes.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because COVID-19 has been my great spiritual chiropractic. These terrible circumstances have shown me I can’t give a f*** anymore. Life is too delicate. And I can’t wait around for people to decide about my creative work anymore.
So… she will live here. You get to find out Whatever Happened to Austin Wellington. Ten pages at a time. Every third week. Until it’s finished.
If you love it, you’ll wonder why the hell I didn’t try harder to push her on people.
If you hate it, you’ll be psyched I didn’t kill a tree to print it.
And best of all, you won’t have to have it sitting in your email inbox. It’ll be here every 3rd week to take it or leave it. You can just wait ’til next week where I tell you all the craziness swimming around in my head and reflect on death, depression and anxiety [people really seem to dig that :) ]
So without further chatter, hit that little arrow on the left for April 27 Chapter 1. Whatever Happened to Austin Wellington?
Stay safe, thanks for reading, and I’m sending all the love
xo