November was an interesting month at Elf land. Fifty percent of our family members were participating in the National November Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. Tanya and I took it up and had a great time with it.

I only came to know about NaNoWriMo mid October when I was trying to educate myself about book sales and other stuff. Someone mentioned NaNoWriMo in their youtube video. It looked exciting, but wasn’t mid October too late to jump into something like that without any planning?

The NaNoWriMo challenge involves writing 50,000 words in the month on November. That amounts to about 1667 words a day. Writers take part in this self regulated challenge with the hope that they will have their novels completed at the end of the month.

I told Tanya about NaNoWriMo. On October 31, we were driving to Tanya’s friend’s place for Halloween, when she suddenly asked what I thought of NaNoWriMo. I told her that I was tempted to give it a try, and she felt the same. So the NaNoWriMo challenge was on.

Tanya surprised me. She said that she had a novel in mind since a long time, with characters and everything. I had no idea! She was also methodical in her approach. She downloaded a format for her novel. For the entire month of Nov, she kept up with it and managed to get through her 50,000 words on Nov 30. This was a major challenge for her since on Mondays and Wednesdays she is busy from 8 am to 7 pm with her trade school and kickboxing. I know she wrote 3000 words in a day more than once! That is no mean task for anyone.

As for me, I had no ideas to begin with. So my plan was to write a bunch of short stories, blogs, research on trash and anything else that I wanted and see where I would get. The challenge proved to be a most rewarding and an amazing learning experience for me. I am still in awe with how much one can achieve with such a simple activity.

To begin, I had nothing to go on. My picture book, “A flying boy” is already written. So I spent the first couple of write ups on making sequels for the book. The sequels were different characters’ points of view of the same story. Finally, I rewrote the entire book in a poetry format! This was the most fun. But after redoing the same story four times, I was absolutely done with it.

I then moved on to my second book, Animal Diaries. This book is proving to be a challenge. To move further, I had to get an opinion. Unfortunately while the editor worked, my book couldn’t move.

I then moved onto trash research. My plan is to ultimately research trash generation and alternatives to plastic generation and hopefully come up with solutions to our trash problems. However, I realized that trying to research as well as write was very time consuming. On a couple of days I worked for four hours. That wasn’t sustainable. So I had to put a lid on the trash!

Now I finally had to pause and think about what to write. When one actually pauses and thinks is when the ideas finally come! To my delight and surprise, stories came as I spent time staring into space.

My second picture book, named “Mili finds her voice”, was the next story that I wrote. My hope is to create a picture book with this story. Of course, picture books are very expensive to produce, so this can become a chapter book if “The flying boy” does not end up generating revenue.

After this I drew a blank. And then a most surprising thing happened. I sat to write a story with no thought in my head. It’s called “Emily’s day”, where Emily doesn’t have any thoughts on how to spend her day. As my story went on, so did Emily’s day. At the end of my story, and Emily’s day, a sweet story came to life. This was an intensely satisfying experience.

Finally, after fifteen days of wandering, jumping from story to story and generating smaller ideas, I had an inspiration that resulted in a 30,000 word book. So far unnamed, this is probably my favorite story that I wrote so far. It’s about things that happen to a ship in a bottle and to various creatures that are linked to the ship. The story that I worked on so far is haphazard, since there was no initial plan and the book came to existence as it moved. In fact, this book is so far like a dream, where things happen and then other things happen, and nothing is planned. So, for instance, the kids started off as 8 year old, and then mid way I had to make them 12 and 13 year old!

Both Tanya and I are very happy to have met the challenge of writing 50K words each. We are, however, leery of what we have written. I can safely say that my 50 K is a lot of garbage (so essentially I did deal with trash!). However, the trash holds great treasures and I am quite optimistic that It’s not going to end up in landfill!

Tanya and I agree that we need to redo a lot of our work. So we are going to be doing a 420JanWriMo, which will be a second writing month in Jan where we redo our work, and hopefully get it to a more reasonable place.

There’s a lot of criticism of NaNoWriMo online. It allows the use of AI for the challenge. People found this very upsetting. However, it doesn’t bother me. AI is here to stay, and we may as well accept the role of AI in writing. I loved NaNoWriMo, because it was a path of self discovery for me. What an amazing challenge. In fact, I looked at it as more of an indulgence to my creative energy than a challenge. Looking forward to repeating such a creative indulgence next year!