Joshua Thorin Messer

So this is really the first focused, sustained, clearly-defined goal writing sprint I’ve ever really done, I tried doing NaNo twice in the past but burned out pretty quick. That is all just to say that I no longer know a lot about my writing process. In the past when I was younger and just wrote without thinking about it, obviously I did not really have much of a process and what I wrote tended to be short fiction and episodic.

And I guess that’s what’s going on with my NaNo, I described what I’m doing in terms of how Burroughs is portrayed in Naked Lunch (the movie). I’m just writing like a maniac and not worrying at all about making sure I’ve locked down Chapter 1, chapter 2, etc. I know the main arc and most of what I want to have happen and I can always go in after the sprint and make it a true cohesive novel rather than a series of incidents. This is also part of why I planned such an aggressive schedule: With 2 full weeks where the schedule only calls for 1000 words a day, which honestly I could probably do while juggling flaming hoops and baking a batch of cookies, I hope to use those 1000 words and the extra time to do a lot of organizing.

But the real key is to finish and to hit the 50k. Even if all I have is a loosely connected pile of random episodes, even if 2/3 of it is a turd, it’s my turd and I love it and it can be polished up into something worth showing.