Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? Well until a few months ago, I hadn’t either. A friend of mine did a speech on the experience in my Toastmasters club and it piqued my interest, but then got shoved into that mental junk drawer in the back of my mind. Then, I had the good fortune to meet one of my Facebook friends live and in person and he mentioned the NaNoWriMo challenge. When things (or themes) reoccur in my life I take that as a sign and said – that’s it! It must be meant for me to do this challenge so I am going to jump in.
NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It is a monthlong challenge where people all over the world commit to writing 50,000 words during the month of November. Traditionally, most people work on a fiction novel. However, there are many “NaNoRebels” who choose to write outside of the fiction guidelines. I decided I would take on the rebel status and take this opportunity to work on my caregiving eBook.
That was Halloween. NaNoWriMo was starting the next day. I did the quick math – 50,000 Words breaks down to 1,667 Words per day. The finished product, about 200 pages. I don’t want to write anything that lengthy but I jumped on it. For about 4 days I was going strong. However, the journey was much more emotional than I wanted to experience at that time. I quickly realized this was not going to work. I want to write an ebook to help others who unexpectedly find themselves in the role of caregiver, but I still have some healing of my own to do. Then an idea comes to me – what about that dream you had a couple years ago? I’d written down the basic idea and didn’t really delve too much into fleshing it out; but it was hilarious and would be PERFECT for the NaNoWriMo challenge.
On day 5 I completely switched gears and started writing this novel based on a dream from a