Assumption

As a point of departure, let’s just assume I am nuts on two counts:

1. I have decided to participate seriously this year in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which promises, “thirty days and nights of literary abandon”. The goal is to write a novel within the month of November of 50,000 words or longer.
2. I am displaying the above badge on my blog. Confirmation indeed of my first assumption.

Disadvantages

1. Apart from unpublished snippets (= ghastly stuff which never made it last year), my novel so far has no plot, no characters, no location, and I made up a title on the fly to register “my novel”. We do, however, have a genre. Hmm, but that may change too.
2. I have enough work to keep me busy the entire month of November without writing any novel, thank you very much.
3. I am starting this venture 3 days late.
4. Rules state you need to upload your novel for word count verification between 25 and 30 November. So, assuming I make the 25 November deadline, this means I need to produce  at least 2,400 (give or take) fairly intelligible words which can vaguely be described as fiction every day for the next 21 days. No, you do not count the 25th, silly.

Advantages

1. My novel has no plot, no characters, no location, and no proper a title.
2. It is being written under a pseudonym, for the time being.
3. I am a fast typist.
4. I have not read any novel to speak of in the last five years. You may well gasp, but that is life. Rubbish, there was that one Portuguese one (had to learn the language first), and half an English one in 2008 which I left behind when we emigrated. The advantage is that I cannot be tainted with anyone else’s ideas or plots. God help me if I plug into the universal cosmic consciousness and pluck out something someone else has put there by mistake!
5. With all the years I have been translating, I know what 2,500 words look like.
6. I have translated two pulp fiction titles from German into English, each of which was roughly 55,000 words. I churned each of those out in one month, and spent a great deal of time torturing myself to find alternatives for, “he said softly”. Bloody whimp. I am fairly certain I can produce something better than those unfortunate two contributions to what is loosely termed “literature”.
7. And I am quite capable of not starting my sentences with “and”. But I do make exceptions.
8. If I miss the word count or the deadline, I will have the longest single blog post in the history of blogging.
9. What I have in mind will be nothing like most of the content of my blog. How refreshing!

As we can see, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Glad you like that bit of sophistry.

I shall put a word count under the web badge from time to time. It is a great fat zero now.

I am off to make spaghetti bolognaise. How literary!

Allison

P.S. I am publishing a daily log on this process under the NaNoWriMo_2012 page located at the top of my blog. Also: a daily NaNoWriMo neologism – just for fun.