Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 5 (49,995 to go)

But they’re the most important five words! Yes, I’ve come up with an opening line that summarizes the entire novel. In fact, it’s so telling that I can’t put it at the beginning where (everyone knows) the opening line that summarizes the entire novel goes. I’ll have to hide it after a dramatic, interest-grabbing prologue instead.

I know, the suspense is killing you. Here it is: “Tell me about your father.” Lovely in its triteness, it will slip by the reader like a greased pig. Other NaNoWriters may have stayed up all night to take advantage of their first piece of November; I went to bed. The muse needs her beauty rest if she’s going to pump out 50,000 words without even an outline.

Besides outlining, my wasted pre-NaNo weeks should have been devoted to research. I did manage to stop by the library for a pile of research material before it was, technically, November. It’s rare that I complete something hours before the deadline like that.

Speaking of planning, the obvious approach to NaNoWriMo is to divide 50,000 by 30 and come up with a daily word count of 1,667. That approach, while mathematically sound, is far too pedestrian for my work of speed-art. I prefer to divide 50,000 by 800 to get 63 scenes. That’s not quite round enough, though, so let’s divide 50,000 by 833 to get 60 scenes. That’s 2 scenes a day, a literary concept my muse can wrap her (stolen) mind around. One scene for breakfast and one for dinner, as it were.

Since it’s the afternoon already, I’m one scene behind. The weekend is clearly the time to catch up on such things, so I hope that by Sunday I’ll be back in the running. There’s no hope of my being the first to the finish line - there are 10,000 participants this year, I heard, and I’m no trilogy-writer like the fantasy people. This is just a little sci-fi novel that’s off to a slow start.