C a r o l y n D a u g h t e r s

National Novel Writing Month (called NaNoWriMo for short) came to an end on Wednesday, November 30, and I hit my 30,000-word goal. They aren’t pretty words, mind you. Quite the opposite actually. But 30,000 words are 30,000 words, so that’s something, right?

Last Thursday, December 1, I drove along icy night roads and listened to writer Erin Morgenstern on NPR. A fan of the NaNoWriMo model, she talked about how she’d crafted a book called The Night Circus in three Novembers (and during the months in between).

Now, I haven’t read Erin’s book, but from what I understand it’s about the arrival of a Cirque … Continue Reading

Folks, I have 8 more days to hit my personal goal of 30,000 words for my novel in November, and guess what? I’m up to 24,508 words. For the uninitiated, that’s 74 double-spaced pages in Times Roman 12 font. Woo!

Now, most published novels are anywhere from 70,000 to 150,000 words (150-300 printed pages) in length. So that means that by the end of November, I’ll be 20-50% done.

Right?

Wrong.

In order to knock out 30,000 words in November, I’ll have had to knock out 30,000 words in November. That means I’ll have had to dump loads of crap onto the page. Appallingly … Continue Reading

It’s the 15th of the month, and I should be about 15,000 new words into my novel by now. Instead, I’ve written only about 5,000 new words. Slacker, right? Yes and no. See, I’ve been fixated for days on a two-page section of the novel about a spider.

Thing is, I don’t even like spiders. Case in point: A couple years back I saw a big spider on the living room carpet, and I hid from it for something like two hours. Imagine my surprise when the spider turned out to be a hairband.

I really don’t like spiders.

Still, I’ve … Continue Reading

It’s National Novel Writing Month – called NaNoWriMo in the hippest of literary circles – and I’m writing a novel at warp speed. Which is another way of saying that I’m making as much progress with the book as I am with this blog.

My plan is to rewrite (read: completely overhaul) a 650-page novel I finished 4 years ago. It’s a first-person story about one woman’s mourning, guilt, and redemption after the death of her husband in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Sounds heavy, right? Well, the story’s chock full of black humor, which lightens the load somewhat.

So if … Continue Reading