It’s the beginning of Week Two of National Novel Writing Month.    Of course, I am behind where I want to be.  It turns out that writing a “mere 1,667 words a day” is not the simple task I envisioned it would be.  My goal failed to take into account the following obstacles:   (1) I have  a (more than) full-time job (2) writing on a laptop on a crowded bus can be inconvenient at times.   I am usually cramped up against the left-hand wall of the bus which seriously impacts my utilization of the left-hand keys on the keyboard, including the letters “a” and “e” which I apparently use frequently and (3) writing a novel is more than just putting 50,000 words down on paper (or, in my case, on a USB drive).     I sailed through the Prologue and wasted time on the Reviewers’ Quotes for the Back Cover, which even I knew couldn’t be included in my word  count.  And then it became  time to write the novel itself, when the real work began.   That was when I encountered the fourth obstacle.   As Stephen King describes it  “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.”

At the end of Week One I have written 6,846 words, and some of them I really like.   I am still determined to finish the novel in November, but realize now that it will only be a very rough draft.  But I will have have written a first-draft of a novel, something I have been planning to do for years, ever since my Creative Writing class in high school almost 40 years ago.

In a little over two hours, National Novel Writing Month begins!  The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in the 30  days of November.  I planned to participate two years ago, but this year I am determined to finish.   50,000 words in 30 days is a mere 1667 words per day. I plan to emulate my favorite author, Anthony Trollope, and spend my commuting time on my novel.   So farewell to facebook from my iPhone and games of Spider Solitaire and Bookworm.      It’s not too late to sign up!  This year I really will write my novel.