Well, it finally happened. I signed up for NaNoWriMo. Here was my immediate reaction once I registered:
Kidding! It looked more like this:
My project is an anthology of 10 short stories, since I did not have enough prep time to work on this year's big novel. (That's gonna require a lot more research and time.) Still. I'm nervous, and I made myself start announcing it online to keep from backing out at the eleventh hour, haha.
Bottom line: although I've written novel-length stories before - hell, I've even written 50K in a month before - I'm still afraid of "getting things wrong" in a big unedited draft that's written over 30 days. Which is why this blog by Chuck Wendig is so, so timely.
...in getting it ‘wrong’ you may already be getting it right. We often like to think of ‘right’ as being a replicable thing, a series of examples from those who came before. But also remember that many of the greatest successes in fiction are those who took a hard left turn away from HOW IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DONE — they drove right off the cliff, and in that, did something new, something different, something very much wrong. Wrong is right and right is wrong and nobody can much tell which side is up and which side is down. Dogs and cats living together. Go forth. Embrace wrong. Nobody knows anything. Seize the freedom that comes with that."
So I'm gonna keep that in mind this month: everything's wrong, but it's all right.
Let's rock Nano and get that 50K in the bank!