So. I cheated. I woke up early enough today to get my sleepy behind out of bed, open Typewriter on my Mac (which thankfully I know how to save in, now), and let my character rattle and prattle.

She had a much different voice than I expected. She did not want to be corralled into the voice I thought she would be.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about today, the characters that talk to me, in the privacy of my oval-ish cranium. I wanted to talk about Nanowrimo, or ‘Wrimo, as the initiated call it for short.

A dear, wonderful friend read through my 3 previous posts on Nanowrimo yesterday, and her comments went something like:

I read your three NaNoWriMo entries.
I liked a lot of it.
I was amused by a lot of it.
I was confused by a lot of it.

Sorry your words got erased :-( I thought it was funny that you “weren’t attached to them” until they were detached.

I guess I would like you to tell me (and the rest of the readers) at the outset what the objective is…..

Any why is it “cheating” if you start now? Which goes back to the “objective”…. Is the goal to just write and keep writing? Is the goal to complete something?

Ah.

Through the grace of an un-obvious acronym, my friend does not know about Nanowrimo, which in its full expanded greatness stands for National Novel Writing Month.

My friend is also not initiated to the objective, accepted by many writers, to frantically, methodically, and many other adverbs ending in -ly write their way to a 50,000 word novel starting on November 1 and finally, stepping away from their instrument of writing on November 30th, finished or not, time’s up. Cheating is pre-emptive starting before Nov 1 (which I will admit I do), editing a previously written work (which I did last year), and, according to my Municipal Liason (ML), repeating the same words over and over (like this morning, when I wrote, with the voice of Nemo’s friend Dori singing in my head: just keep writing, just keep writing, what do we do? We write!; until my character started talking to me again).

What is the goal of ‘Wrimo? The easy answer is to write 50,000 words, or a complete first draft of a novel, in 30 days. But really, I think the goal is deeper than that. The goal, for me, is to better my inner critic, lock her (or him, my critic has gender issues), in a closet, or just stop listening to (it), and type. And type some more. And keep typing, even if what I’m typing is so riddled with cliches and boring circuitous phrases, but do it anyway. Even if my critic says it sucks, and feasts on rabbit turd pellets for breakfast, lunch, and snacks.

So it was ridiculously appropriate to hear Dori singing happily to Just! Keep! Writing! this morning.

That’s what I think the goal is. What about you, fellow ‘Wrimo? What do you think is the goal of National Novel Writing Month, aside from abject isolation and furious typing?

p.s. If anyone else is using Typewriter on a Mac, here’s an easy shortcut to getting your word count from TextEdit:

Save your file as a .txt, (Control+S, or Apple+S !!!), then open Terminal, and “cd” to change directories until you arrive at the directory containing your file.

Then run this handy command “wc” or word count, followed by “-w” to tell wc to count words (not lines, characters, etc):

$ wc -w filename.txt
735 filename.txt

And voila! Your word count for this file is 735. Post me a note if you are lost and need more breadcrumbs.

Next: Tricking the lunatic in my head by writing in sprints (Day 1)