November Craziness

I didn’t initially sign up for nanowrimo this year. I’m in the middle of the first draft of Enslaved by Angels book three of my What-if-aliens-invaded-in-1210 AD? series and it hasn’t been going particularly fast. My modest goal has been to write 1000 words per day and finish sometime in November. (I’m at 46,000 words right now with probably 20,000 to go.) I’m not under any deadline pressure, so there seemed no need to nano.

Yet on Monday, November 3^rd, I signed up anyway--for an entirely different novel. Craaazy.

Do I intend to keep working on Enslaved by Angels? Yes. In fact, it will remain the Do-first priority.

Do I intend to count both wordcounts? No.

Do I have any chance of winning? Probably not.

So why am I doing this? To answer that, I have to back up a step and give you a little history. You see, back in 2001 Simon & Schuster published two YA SF books of mine: Violet Eyes and Silver Eyes. Book one did moderately well, earning a second printing, book two not so well. The publisher chose not to buy a third book in the series and books one and two went out of print. 

That would normally have been the end of matters, but for ebooks and the self-publishing revolution. Both Violet Eyes and Silver Eyes are still available as ebooks and after years of nothing, I starting receiving (small) royalty checks again. And I noticed that most of my ‘fans’ on my Facebook page were in fact fans of this particular series.

 So I dusted off the old first draft of book three and started working on it every Monday--the only time I had to spare. I ran a feature on my Facebook page called  Mike and Angel Monday. And last July I self-published Angel Eyes. A few months ago, I started plotting out book four in the same way, committing to at least one hour every week.

And that’s the book that I started on Monday, two days late, for nanowrimo. To my stunned surprise I got down 1500 words (in addition to the 1200 I put down on Enslaved). Whether it’s due to the creativity shift Sonya Clark spoke about or the fact that I know and love these characters so well, it’s flowing. And I want to keep up that flow, not wait until Monday again, so I’m now officially doing two first drafts in the same month.

Craziness, I know. But also fun.

Anyone else out there doing nanowrimo on a whim?