Nanowrimo, Anyone?

Every November I go crazy.

There’s no other way to describe it. I start on Nov. 1 writing a novel. I write anywhere from 1500 to 2000 words a day until I finish the novel. When I’m done I have added to the storehouse of the Literature of Mark Bruce.

National Novel Writing Month, or Nanowrimo, comes but once a year. I’ve been at it since 2003. Count ’em. That’s 18 novels (if I finish this year, that is) over the years. And not one of them has been published.

Oh, one of them came very close. I wrote a mystery called Sparrow’s Blood in which a Public Defender investigator looks into a series of murders at a homeless camp, and falls in love with a young woman working with the indigent at the camp. I thought it was a good novel. So did the lady who volunteered to be my agent. But she shopped it to 13 different publishers, each of which said they “didn’t love it” enough to publish it. Two publishers offered to make it into an ebook, which I was OK with. Still don’t know what happened to that offer.

The point is, I wrote the damned novel during Nanowrimo while being infatuated with a young woman, much younger than I was. I put her in the novel as a co-protagonist. She is the Sparrow of the title. I was proud of this book, as it was the first really good novel I’ve written. Alas, the young woman who inspired the character of Amy Bailey had the same reaction as publishers. She didn’t love it. Or me. In fact, she called me “toxic.”

But I digress. This is the time of year when I go mad for writing the novel. I power through it at night, even in this uncertain election year. I sometimes have no idea of what I will write about until the day of–or the day after–Nanowrimo starts. But that doesn’t deter me. It makes things more exciting.

This year, for instance, I had four different novels I could have written. But then on Halloween I was watching the History Channel on ghost houses. The mediums kept going through the houses saying “Can you hear me? Do you want to say something?” I had this vision of a young woman saying “Can I help you?” to the ghosts. Thus my present Nano, “The Lost,” was born. I’m already 4000 words deep. And I haven’t done today’s session.

If this damned election can just resolve, I’ll have full time to devote to the novel. Oh, and by the way, this is all happening as I’m hitting the home stretch on “Minerva James and the God of War,” the first Minerva novel. So I’m writing two novels at once.

Here’s to hoping I don’t get confused.