This semester, a student came up to me and asked me if I knew that November was national novel writing month. I said I didn’t. She informed me about NaNoWriMo, saying that she’d done it for the past few years and was planning on doing it again this year. I said something about November being a…not-so good month for this kind of thing—so close to the end of the semester. She said that was part of the challenge.

As you all know, first and foremost, I’m a poet. But I do enjoy writing fiction. In undergrad, my only exposure to fiction was in a reading/workshop hybrid course on Crime and Urban Noir fiction. We read a lot of wonderful books, then at the end of the semester wrote something inspired by those books. My story was horrible. I was told that I can’t make a character likeable and then…not so likeable. My character was too complicated. It wasn’t believable. No one would act like that. My revision was essentially a whole new story. I kept the character (though a simplified version) and I threw in a bunch of Muppets. Seriously, muppets.

During my MA, I took sort of two fiction workshops. One was a fiction workshop, during which I wrote two stories. I like both of them. They still need a lot of work, but this is where I realized that I’m funny. Well, that doesn’t sound quite right. I’ve always thought that I’m funny. Other people (cough cough, lame ex boyfriends, cough!) have disagreed with my assertion that I’m funny. I make jokes in the classes that I teach. I’d say that the response from my bored freshmen student audience is probably 50 % positive, 50% no reaction. But in those stories, I was damn funny, and when people told me that my stories, in plot, character, and dialogue made them laugh, I felt really good.

The second workshop that I took was a hybrid course on the campus novel. We read a bunch of campus novels, then we outlined our campus novel, wrote an excerpt, and wrote a pitch/the back of the book. I really enjoyed this exercise, and, enthused about my novel idea, I even wrote a few chapters after the class was over.

Then it died.

Then it did what I imagine all stereotypical novels do, it sat on a shelf and didn’t go anywhere. I realized that I had become one of those people who said, “Yes, I’m working on my novel…” That’s really pretentious. There are thousands, if not millions, of those people, and I don’t want to be like that! Derrick’s bothered me for a while about needing to finish it, saying that it’s too fun to just leave the way it is. He’s so wonderful.

So I started off my first semester here thinking that I would devote every Friday afternoon to my novel. It didn’t happen. Fridays are too distracting at the end of the week. I had a few meetings that interfered. I had to cook food for a few parties and clean up the house. I had to come home and watch a movie. It just didn’t work. And obviously NaNoWriMo didn’t catch on either, though I think November was much too tragically chaotic for me to have needed something extra on my plate.

So I was just talking to Mom about my novel, and I decided to go back and read what I have. It’s more than I remembered. It’s funnier than I remembered.

So this is what I’m going to do. I may have missed NaNoWriMo, BUT I am going to try to use the idea of NaNoWriMo to get me going. My goal would be to write an 175 page novel at 50,000 words by the end of this school year. So I would give myself not just 1 month, but a little less than 6 months. Right now, I have 7,067. That’s almost 20% done, right? I have the whole plot planned out. I have no excuses for not finishing. I can’t say that I don’t know where it’s going. I know exactly where it’s going. I know the plot, what happens to all the characters. I know this town. Time to knock this thing out. Will keep you posted.