It's that NaNoWriMo Time of Year Again

Something that I've taken part in, or at least tried to take part in, every year for the past three of four years now is the NaNoWriMo: the National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month, specifically November. What you end up with is not necessarily the greatest novel ever. It might be a bit short. It will likely need a lot of editing. It is, most likely, a rough draft. But, to get those 50k words written would be a huge accomplishment.

Last year, I think I've come the closest I have ever been. The problem I ran into, however, was that I couldn't find a direction for the story; it was about time travel, but I wasn't sure what I was trying to do or say about it and I hadn't placed any limits on it. If you've never tried it, writing a story about traveling through time / stopping time without any limits on its frequency, while the actual time traveling is trivially easy, is extraordinarily difficult. I also didn't have a good idea on how to handle the repercussions of changing the past and how it would affect the future. Would it split the universe? Would it simply change the present? I didn't know, and the story died right there.

This year, I think I've learned a bit about what not to do. I don't have a strong idea about where I want to go with this new story, but I've had a number of different ideas over the years and some of them just keep nagging me. Specifically, the concept of a special hammer won't let up. So, I have a start, and 536 words written. It isn't much, but hopefully it will be enough to give me something to think about and try to figure out where to go from here.

For those of you who are mathematically inclined, to stay on target requires approximately 1667 words per day. As this is the fourth day, to be on schedule requires 6667 words by the end of the day. So, only 6131 words left for today. Already, it isn't a very promising performance for this year, but I'm going to stick it out, anyways.