Well this Nano thing's all a bit daft, really

In principle it's a jolly good idea; in no other way can you motivate yourself to get so much down on paper in such little time. However one always seems to forget just what an enormous commitment it is, just how much time is spent chained to a computer each day, what great chunks of the month are spent staring at a screen and how desperately easy it is to fall behind. Like most years, I'm cheating a bit, even if I'm still aiming to physically write 50,000 words in a month (albeit not all part of the same work, not even all fiction - yes, you guessed it, this blog post along with all others written in November are going in the word count - call it unorthodox.) The first year I did Nano was the only year I did it properly and actually won (I began with a pretty solid outline for a story with 50,000 words of material in my noggin, and was at a time when I had only 10 hours a week of work on the agenda), and since then I've entered every year, cheating in various ways to claim my not-really earned prize. At the end of the notorious week 2, everyone seems to have run out of steam and are wondering what led them to pledge so much time and energy to such a seemingly fruitless cause (after all, if you're going to delete half of what you wrote because it's bullshit you spewed out while trying to reach a certain word count, why did you bother at all?). Admittedly this is not at all my style of writing, and I prefer to research thoroughly before putting pen to paper, and then I will literally put pen to paper before typing it up, taking a long time deliberating over exactly what to put. I get called a bad writer because I rarely scrap chunks of what I've written and my final draft generally ends up looking very much like the first, but I say if you take enough time to think about what you're writing, and you like what you've written, why write it in the first place if you're going to delete it later? A matter of hot debate among we creative writing types. I tried this though and continue to do it just to challenge my old-fashioned and ingrained approach.
The piece I'm working on for Nano alongside the Price of Man, The Mid Atlantic Express, is a means of loosely connecting a series of short stories that have been loitering in my creative writing notebook for some time, and this suits Nano pretty well, so don't think I'm about to give up. And in any case, by the time late October rolls round we've forgotten the hardships of the previous year and TGIO and think it's a grand idea to do it all over again, artistic license added to the rules becoming my new norm. I'm looking forward to 'winning' and having some decent work out of it at the end, but roll on next year!
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