It's On, Baby.......

It's official: NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is on. The objective is to write 50,000 words during the month of November, and people from all over the world are taking up the effort. A friend suggested trying it out as a means to unrust some writing chops, and I've taken him up on the challenge. And tonight was the first effort.

I have to say, so far, I'm enthusiastic. I'm not an avid writer; it comes in fits and starts. But I'm using this as a process exercise - essentially, re-energizing a stream-of-consciousness writing state. I'm approaching it differently than most in that I'm not trying to write a novel. In fact, I can't remember the last time I read a novel. I find the world too fascinating a place to bother with fiction. What I do have, however, are shelves of travel journals in various stages of wear and tear, and a long-harbored goal to one day write my own travel experiences. There are now a few women writers on the subject, but when I initially had this dream, for the most part, the women writers were from the Victorian age or wrote about how many guys they could bag on summer break on Ibiza or Cancun. That's changed, but only somewhat, and I've often entertained the idea of adding my travel experiences to those shelves of writing mostly occupied by the men whose books I've devoured over the years.

I'm not setting out to write a travel book - but to exercise my writing abilities. And, if at the end of this exercise, something interesting emerges, I may just pursue that output a bit further to find out if it could yield any fruit. For the time being, though, I'm excited about my first night's work. I've already veered seriously away from my outline of travel stories and written predominantly about my back-story; how it was that I found myself overseas in the first place. The rest of the month will be focused on writing about some of my favorite and most interesting travel experiences. They're not all shiny, happy stories - sometimes the best story to read after the fact is about the experience that, at the time, seemed unlivable.

At any rate, I feel I'm off to a good start, with just under 3500 words which were, essentially, the result of a stream-of-consciousness mind-dump. Which, after all, is the point. For me.