Can I do it? Can I do it? Oh I don’t know. =/
Day 2 of NaNoWriMo, and I’ve written about 4000-plus words. I’ve been self-psychoing myself, saying you can do it Ally! It’s just er, 50 000 words!, reading tweets on #nanowrimo to motivate myself, and reading the word counts of other people to push myself to do more.
In case you are wondering, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is in essence a movement/campaign for hapless wannabe writers to write 50 000 words in 30 days. It’s a global phenomenon for about ten years now, and this is what creator Chris Baty says about it:
You’re basically looking at the worst writing contest in the history of writing contests—spending 30 days toiling away on a novel that nobody ever reads. But the fact that nobody reads it is a really empowering aspect of NaNoWriMo. You can turn off the inner editor that slows so many of us when we sit down to write a first draft. You really do have a chance to free yourself from the inner voice that says you’re a horrible writer and that you have no business doing this. You can run amok in imagination for 30 days. Once you’ve done that, it forever changes the way you write first drafts.
So it works out to about 1,667 words every day. It all sounds very fine and dandy and easy but as I am not exactly known for my iron-forge willpower, sticking to writing an essay every single bloody day, for 30 days, is kind of a big deal.
But hopefully I can do it!
PS: Nanowrimo is just about getting the writing done out of the way. At this point of time I do not know whether my writing’s of the quality to be published, or it will be horrible crap that will burn my eyes.
On a sidenote:
Ridiculously egoistic self-proclaimed bestselling writers piss me off. Self publishing your novels does not maketh you a bestselling writer. Also, spamming my email and Facebook to get me to buy your book isn’t the best way to generate goodwill.
ally chua 