Why I Decided to Impulsively Tackle NaNoWriMo

Okay, so I wasn’t planning on doing NaNoWriMo AT ALL. And then I was seeing all these NaNoWriMo posts and it made me want to do it to, so I decided to impulsively tackle NaNoWriMo this year. 

This is my first time doing it, hence why I had no plans to before. But every single year I see people doing it and talking about it, and by mid-November I wish I could join. I didn’t want that to happen again, so I just thought (yesterday, actually) I would finally give it a try. I’m super late too because there are only two more days until it starts and I hardly have any planning.

I don’t do much planning for when I write anyways, but I do like to have it there to refer to when I’m lost. My character sketches, world building info, and outlines are pretty scarce and they don’t have much on them, mostly because I get so excited I just go ahead and write the dang novel. Which, by the way, I have yet to finish a single novel. But this is my time!

I’ve mentioned it to other people but I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly said it on here, but my current WIP is a dark fairytale retelling, specifically Sleeping Beauty AND Snow White. There is an evil queen out to get the main characters (there are three of them) and she has evil dragons and cats and things like that. Also, this queen froze over the entire continent like 200(ish) years before. She’s basically a witch, but the kingdom is like her own hidden one (?). Honestly I don’t even know how to begin to describe it, but I’m loving it so far and I’m only like 15,000 words in. 

So for NaNo, I’m going to be doing a prequel to my current WIP (I’m putting a bit of a hold on it) about the evil queen. It’s kind of like how in The Lunar Chronicles we get Fairest, the prequel about Levana, which tells her story. My NaNo novel will be all about this queen and how she basically became who she is in my other WIP (Neither of them have actually titles, I’m sorry). I’m really excited to write this though, and I think it will be fun to write about my main villain.

I’ll tell you this much: The main character is named Myra (with a few middle names and a last name) and she comes from a noble family in the Kingdom of Aren. Myra is the sixth of eleven children (I know, so many) and has been overshadowed by her older and younger siblings her entire life. At seventeen, only a few months away from her arranged marriage to the son of another prominent family, she leaves Aren in hopes of getting freedom. Myra ends up meeting all sorts of new people from other kingdoms and outlaws, all leading up to how she became an “evil queen” and what made her freeze over the entire continent.

Can you tell that I’m really excited to finally do NaNo? because I am. It’s going to be so much fun for me but so hard because 50,000 words is a lot. I don’t know if I can do it in thirty days. How some people write like four times that in less is unfathomable to me. Hopefully someday I’ll reach those levels. 😉

Are you deciding to participate in NaNoWriMo this year? Did you also unexpectedly decided to, or was it all planned? Let me know in the comments!