Mr. De Burke is attempting NaNoWriMo 2017, writing 50,000 words in November. He currently writes 750 words daily and will need 1,667 words per day for the challenge. His plan: draft in November, rest in December, edit in early 2018, then self-publish a book for high school readers.
Chapters
What's going on, guys? I'm excited. First of all, because it's Halloween, so actually, I should be dressed up in some sort of costume if it's Halloween. I think I have a scary enough face, right? But that's beside the point. The fact is, I'm excited for the challenge that I'm going to be doing next month. So, next month is NaNoWriMo, or November, and so NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, and so the challenge of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel in the space of November, so 30 days. So ideally you've been planning before November 1st. I haven't done much planning, so I'm going to be starting pretty much from scratch. I've got a rough idea, I've got some notes down on the scratchpad here and a rough idea in my head of how I'm going to take things, how I'm going to approach it, a rough storyline, but my plan is to just wing it, get on the keyboard and start writing. We'll see how that turns out. But essentially, to win the challenge, is you complete 50,000 words and you don't need to necessarily publish a book by the end of November. If you do, that's a massive feat, being able to go from zero to published in 4 weeks. That's incredible. With self-publishing, it's totally doable these days. But if you upload 50,000 words to the Nanowiro website, I'll put the link in the description so you can sign up too and we can pep talk each other and tell each other how hard it is to write words on a computer. And share our stories and whatnot. But if by the 30th of November you have 50,000 words uploaded, you win the month. And I think that's, that's a cool challenge. Why am I doing this? Well, over the past year or so, I've been writing 750 words per day in a website called 750words.com. So, that's about 3 pages. But 750 words per day isn't going to cut the 50,000 words in a month. To do 50,000 words in a month, it averages out to 1,666.6 words per day if you write every day. Some days you may have to do more if you miss a day. So, on average, if you round it up, 1,667 words per day for every day in November, and you should hit the 50,000 word goal. I've fallen in love with writing, and if you told me a while ago I was going to be writing or starting to write a book or trying to do a book in a month, I would have said you're insane, and I would have been scared because that sounds like a ridiculously big project for me. I'm going to do it because Daniel Bourke That's what I like to do. I like to set myself kind of ridiculous challenges so that, and jump into them before my brain catches up to think, "Oh, you shouldn't really be doing this, Daniel. You're already doing too much." But I'm excited. I don't know what the book is entirely going to be about. I'd like to, I'm thinking in my head it's going to be targeted towards high school age, slash just out of high school age people. We'll see how it turns out. I want to get it published and I've been looking into self-publishing options. If not, if I think it's good enough, I'll try and find out. I don't even know how to publish a book, so that's going to be a problem for future me. But my goal for November is get the 50,000 words done, just type out the words per day, and then I'm going to leave it for a month. So, wait till 2018, leave it, just let it sit in the back of my mind and process. And then January, February, first quarter of 2018, I'm going to edit it down and into some sort of readable format, because I'm guessing these first 50,000 words that I type out, they're going to be rough. And I think that's important. If you want to jump into a project like this, you've got to let yourself be rough around the edges. And this is going to be my first book. Oh yeah, one more thing. If you're keen to join in on the fun, go to the NaNoWriMo website, make an account, add me if you can. My username will be Mr. De Burke, just M-R-D-B-O-U-R-K-E. Or hit me up on Twitter @MrDeBurke and I'd love to add you. I'm not sure how it works, but if not, we can just go back and forth and encourage each other. Question of the day: if you were going to write a book, what would it be about? Would it be a true crime story? Would it be an adventure story? Would it be a dystopian world or a euphoric future? I don't even know what mine's about. So, hit me up with some ideas. In the meantime, happy riding.
