30 Days, 50k Words: Find Out More About My NaNoWriMo Project

Hey, everybody! Welcome back to my blog! Today, I’d like to talk to you about what I’ll be consumed with this November: NaNoWriMo.

I know we’ve covered this before, but let me share just a bit about what NaNoWriMo is. The acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month, and the goal is this: try to write 50k words in one month. In order to achieve this goal, I need to write roughly 1667 words per day to stay on target, which is about 150 words over the limit I’d given myself for a short story in August. That shouldn’t be too hard, right? I certainly hope not. But the thing that’s going to keep me on track and help me reach my goal by November 30th is your excitement over what I’m writing and how things are going.

So, here’s what I’m going to do. Tonight, I’m going to give you a basic overview of what my story is about. You’ll know the basic plotline (of course not the ending), the general characters, and what my goals are for this month.

Throughout the rest of the month, you can expect three things:

1. A daily word count update on my social media pages

2. A more thorough character introduction each Saturday on my blog during the month of November.

3. Updates throughout the month on how I feel like everything is going, my current mood about the project, and perhaps even where I’m writing from. There may even be pictures.

So, let’s jump right into the project.

This year, I’m working on what I hope will be the first book in a series, a series that currently has no end in sight. Let’s talk a bit more about that. There exists, in the literary world, a subset of fiction called a trope. A trope is, basically, a recurring literary device or cliché that began with figures of speech and has now branched out beyond that. One trope in particular which I was fascinated to learn about was the soulmate trope. In the soulmate trope, Character A and Character B are destined to find one another and fall in love. Typically using a series of happy accidents and little pushes from other characters or the universe itself, the characters find one another, fall in love, and have a happily ever after. So, the fantasy trope has a bit of supernatural as well as fantasy elements to besides the obvious romance element. As I delved into this trope a bit, I began to discover something: very few books had actually been written and printed that contained a soulmate connection between characters. So, I began to do more research, and eventually, an idea was born. The premise for my book is that two people, soulmates, will find one another over and over again in various lifetimes. I wanted to create something that showed love overcoming obstacles, no matter if they were in different classes, parts of the world, ages, etc. However, that would be too much to contain within one book. So, I decided that I would implement another common theme in fantasy: reincarnation. Each time the characters die in one life, they’ll be born in a new, different universe with a new set of trials and journeys ahead of them. I’m very excited to get started, and I have a lot of ideas for different lifetimes to put the characters in.

So, in the first book, we’ll meet the character that initiates the idea of soulmates into this first universe to give us a background into our soulmates as well as a place for our characters to return to in future books before they move on to their next adventure. Next, we’ll meet our two main characters who are living in very different time periods, one during the Renaissance age on the French/German border, and the other who is living in modern times, sans the current pandemic, because where’s the fun in that? The rest of the story will chronicle them finding one another and eventually falling in love.

I don’t want to give too many more details than that away right now so that I can save some for my blog posts throughout November.

My goal, as it currently stands, is just to try to write 1000 words per day. Each Monday, I'll be participating in writing sprints or write-in events with a group of people who are also participating in the event, and those are the times I will use, as well as weekends which are typically not as busy as the weekdays, to bring my word count back up to where it needs to be. If I can write more words than that some days, I certainly will. But 1000 is the minimum I will allow myself to do each day. I may be a frazzled mess by the end of the month, but I'm determined to reach my goal and complete at least 50k words. That may not be my whole book. I suppose we'll have to see.

I hope that you find this idea interesting and that you’ll tag along with me as I attempt to write what I hope will be a fun adventure that will pave the way for our two main characters to live more lifetimes and go on new adventures together. I want to say in advance that I appreciate each and every one of you who will offer support and cheerleading throughout the month ahead. I know I'll need it.

I want to say thank you to those of you who read my entries for Ominous October; it was fun to see where my imagination took me each day. I hope you have a great week this week, and I’ll see you back here next Saturday. Bye!