I did it! I wrote a novel that’s at least 50,000 words long, entirely in the month of November.
Woohoo! I did it! I know this is way out of the ordinary for this website, but as one of my hobbies is writing sci-fi/fantasy novels, I couldn’t help but enter the NaNoWriMo writing contest.
It works this way: There’s an Internet happening every November called the National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that one writes, entirely within the month of November, a novel that’s at least 50,000 words long. If you do, you win. What you win is the right to download a certificate, print it, and write your name on it! Woohoo! I hit my 50,000 words today. And…I ordered the winner’s tee shirt for only $21. The contest is pretty unstructured, and as you might imagine, rather informal. But this is how the American Flying Broomstick stories got their start.
This year’s entry is a novel I call The Berki Blunder. It’s a sci-fi story about aliens investigating the Earth. But here’s the twist: First, the book is written from the aliens’ point of view. Second, the aliens are far less advanced technologically than earthlings, and are here to learn as much as they can, particularly about this magical thing Earthlings call “the Internet.” They wonder how it is that Earthlings have never figured out the secret to using negative mass emulators as motivators for their air and spacecraft, and why Earth’s scientists, so good at general relativity and probing the interior of particle physics, have never stumbled across the way to make hyperspace travel work. But, be that as it may, a small three-Berki craft is on its mission, but things go very badly wrong. Over and over and over. Is it possible a technology exchange can be brought to pass? That’s the question as the Berki hop from one blunder to the next.
When will it be done? Well, I passed the 50,000 word mark today (and thus won NaNoWriMo, although keep in mind that as many people as get their 50K words also win), but I figure I’ve got another 10K or 20K words to go to bring it to its happy conclusion. When I get to that point, I’ll pop it up on Amazon for 99¢ for everyone to look at. Until then, I think I’d best get back to making the ham radio training videos, something that’s been put entirely on hold while writing my novel.