Having worked solidly for a month of straight-up revisions, I find myself with a little bit more personal time. Since November is going to be something of a nightmare for me with work, I’ve decided to do my own internal NaNoWriMo during the month of October.

But what is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, an annual tradition where writers from all over the world give themselves one month to write a 50,000 word novel. The idea is to produce quantity over quality, which is something that many novelists struggle with. I’ve heard multiple times from many authors that it’s much easier to grow flowers out of crap than out of air. I find this to be remarkably true. Once the words are on the page and the story is complete, the revision process is much simpler. In fact, my own experience with Accept Fire and Blood demonstrated to me that once the story is complete, it’s a lot easier to tell what kind of major overhauls the story needed in order to be something worth reading.

I started my internal NaNoWriMo yesterday, 01 October 2010, and will go until 31 October 2010. As I am attending the World Fantasy Convention 2010 in Columbus, Ohio, over Halloween weekend, I’m actually hoping to reach my 50,000 words before I leave for that. I’m also hoping to start pitching Accept Fire and Blood while at WFC, and as it’s designed to be the first book in the series, I think it will be more marketable if I already have an 80% solution on the next book.

I have no statistics or facts to back this next part up, just a weird intuition, but I wonder how many one time novels get queried every day? I think about how proud I am to have finished writing my first novel and how excited I would be to sell it, but I also think there are a lot of authors who spent so much time on *one* novel that they might not get picked up for publication because they have nothing else to market. I think if I were an agent, editor, publisher, etc., I would have second thoughts about people who only had one idea to sell me. And I think as a reader, I might be less inclined to buy an author’s book if I didn’t think there would be more to follow.

So I think it’s a great idea to have as many projects ready to go as I can get. I started my internal NaNoWriMo yesterday and have so far logged 2064 words, which is an interesting 4% complete of my working goal. I guess I better get back to the story then, yes?