NANOWRIMO 2022: Goals, Goals, Goals

It's that time of year again. Nanowrimo time! The time when I take stock of my writing goals for the year and determine how I best want to use the next 30 days of time to piece together at least 50k words of a draft. More on that later!

ESPOOKY SEASON CONTINUES
Not sure what it is this year... maybe the extended Pacific NW summer or the "post-pandemic" lull of life after making some major moves (literally, figuratively). 2022 had ALL THE THINGS --- new job, new house, new city, turning 40, sending my kid to FOR REALS school. Just, big big stuff! Some of it, very, very scary indeed.

I've been desperately watching scary movies all month long to feel the fear and nothing is hitting with the creepy vibes. So, perhaps it's time I take a turn at the helm of horror. Spooky season won't end for me on Halloween night. It will end when I'm done writing the next book: Nowhere Man: A Ghost Story!

NOWHERE MAN
Okay, it's a tentative title, so don't knock it? Well, all my titles are tentative until they're not. It's having a bit of an identity crisis because I refer to it mostly as Ghost Story, but Nowhere Man is really settling in with me, so we'll see. Anywho, I've done all the pre-prep planning that I could in the form of a Pinterest board and multiple playlists. Made an outline with some oomph behind it via Abbie Emmons. The whole premise has already changed from "a ghost that saves a girl's life and then falls in love with her and tries to kill her so they can be together forever" to... well, not that.

I even made character sheets for SIDE CHARACTERS because I am THAT invested. It's been a fun bit of organizing and the thing is that I got SO BORED because I finished all my prep way before November 1, that I started writing it already. 

Yep, I did! We're two chapters in baby, yeah! And I love it? Desmond Jones is my POV character at the moment and he's such a superficial asshole, it's really fun to write him just snarking and silently hating on everyone and everything. I'll be switching to Molly Starr Park's POV in upcoming chapters, so that'll be a fun change-up. I like them. I'm gonna put them through the ringer, but in the end, I think it'll all be OK. 

SYNOPSIS
When Molly Starr Park flees to Portland to restart her life in a brand new city in a brand new job, she arrives to more than she bargained for. The Prothero-provided condo she moves into is haunted by the ghost of Desmond Jones, a former Prothero employee, and he doesn't like her. In fact, he wants her OUT. But both of their lives (well, after-life) are unraveling and despite their corporeal differences, they seem to be the only ones who can help one another.

GOALS, GOALS, GOALS
My goal is to write everyday. Surprise! It's not "produce 50k words in one month" because that doesn't feel super good to me at this point in my life. I have fumbled the last few times I NANO'd simply because I tried to meet an audacious word goal in a compressed and busy holiday season/time of the year which meant pumping out garbage (hey now, go easy, friend) to fill the quota and ending up with an over-bloated manuscript (Rosita) that I now have to trim down to a manageable size. 

I mean, that's always my problem anyway (writing too much) so why not start with a rough draft where I'm writing JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT instead? How about that? 

I'd rather just spend the month of November dedicating time every single day to progressing the manuscript forward, in whatever form that will take. But the idea is I have to write EVERY SINGLE DAY. Even if it's just a sentence or a paragraph or maybe one or two words. I have to open that damn document and make it count. 

*fingers crossed* Here goes anything at all!