Woggy Project #5: '07 NaNo Monkey Novel

Two years ago, about this time of year, I found out about this great yearly event for adventurous writerly types called National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. In November of every year, people with writer-like aspirations, of all ages, genres, geographical locations, and level of professionalism gather together to pursue one crazy goal: to complete the task, within the confines of one month, of writing at least 50,000 words of a novel.

Now, while I am a person who considers myself a writer, and even have a degree from a prestigious university to that affect, I must admit that sitting down to write that many words of the same piece of writing, let alone within one month, is actually something I had never done before. I've written plenty of poems, short stories, articles, essays, a one-act play, and even the whole first act of a screenplay (which trust me, is alot of pages), but a novel is not something I had ever attempted (let alone succeeded) in doing. I have had (of course yet another woggy project) a novel concept which I for years have been nibbling away at, doing research for, creating characters, writing chapters here and there (in no particular order), but the actual full complete writing part, with large volumes of pages to show for it, was a goal so far off on the horizon I wasn't even really sure how one would really go about doing it. I had read novels of course, and knew how to write of course, but putting the two together to actually reach a finished product, well that was something I have to say was not only intimidating but really a completely mystifying process.

Anyway, the actual place where I heard about this NaNo was an online forum that consisted largely of people who were probably young enough to be my own children. When I started hearing so many of them talking about how they not only planned to try this crazy endeavor, but actually complete it, and in fact that many of them mentioned having already completed the endeavor successfully in past years, well, lets just say I had finally run out of excuses. Especially considering I had no pesky obligations like a job or school getting in my way like probably many of the others did, I realized well, what did I have to lose? I signed myself up and began plugging away like I had never done before. I had no idea what I was doing, and ultimately I finished the month no where near the intended goal of 50,000 words, but I have to say the freedom of just sitting down with no purpose other than to see what might happen after I wrote a few words, and then a few more, and then some more after that, was incredibly liberating, and left me at the end of the month with more written content than I had generated in probably the past five years of my life put together. I was decidedly hooked!

But that was 2006, and the NaNo project I am nominating for woggification number 5 is actually the one from last year, which is one that unlike the first strange project, actually has some chance of someday seeing the light of the outside world as a finished and published novel. As you might imagine, I did much better last year, as I this time had an actual plan of attack, and actually gave myself a schedule, and participated regularly in that, succeeding in surpassing several personal best goals I had set for myself. I ended up with over 20,000 words, and a story interesting enough for me to want to see through to the end of complete novel-age. I call it my monkey novel because the main character of the novel is a monkey. My novel even has a mascot, which is the picture you see above.

While I don't know when I will finish this novel, I have high hopes that this is one woggy project that will live to tell tales in its elder frogitude of its good old woggy days.

Since every NaNo novel is to be a new project you do not begin writing until November first, I for sure will not be completing this woggy project next month, as that of course will be set aside for a brand new NaNo-related woggy project. But someday, somehow, I believe my monkey will have his day in the sun.

Things left to complete this woggy project:

• set aside an afternoon to begin writing again
• begin writing my monkey novel again
• monitor progress and continue to make appointments for future writing days/times
• repeat, repeat, repeat!