Part of my planting...

As part of my planting season, as in the past couple of years, during November I am participating in NaNoWriMo.

Oh great, another wanna be novelist talking about how awesome NaNoWriMo is...

Sorta.

But not really.

I firmly believe that the best way to grow is to push yourself. See what you are made of. Challenge yourself as you have never challenged yourself before. Do this in WHATEVER your thing is and you will learn a lot about YOUR THING, but also heaps about YOURSELF.

(I'll stop yelling now.)

Last year I finished NaNo in 19 days. I loved my story. I loved it so much that I went back and started to rewrite it...then I found another story that I loved, so I wrote that. And I loved that so much that I started NaNo.

Yeah, so logical. I know.

Today, Day 7 of the NaNo challenge to write a 50K novel in 30 days, I hit word number 25K.

Week one, half done.

But being ahead of my pace isn't all that I am challenging myself  with this NaNo. I also am collaborating on  the story with my 16 year-old daughter. Her 16K and my 50K is a nice sized story, and we thought that it would be fun to take the solitary activity of writing and make a parent/kids activity out of it.

Our novel is a mother-daughter tale about life, loss, love, and learning to accept, embrace and polish what you are given into a unique and wonderfully gleaming gem of a life.

It's also a love story about mothers and daughters...and there is a mermaid, because both my daughter and I kinda love mermaids.

It might suck in the end, but I don't think it does. My gut tells me otherwise.

See, one of the lessons that I have learned since doing my first NaNo was HOW to listen to my gut. And, I don't know if this is universal, but when my gut talks, it's actually IN MY GUT. It's this weird glowy feeling warming up my belly and radiating to my heart.

Once this challenge is complete, then I will leap with joy into the next challenge unlike last year.

I am going to stop writing novels.

Well, I'm going to stop STARTING them and stopping before they are rewritten. I'm going to accept, embrace and polish them. I'm going to listen to my gut and not start another until the two that I have done this year- and the one that I did last year -are polished bright and shiny into unique and wonderfully gleaming gems.

A lot of bloggers post chapters or excerpts from their NaNo's- but I'm not one of them. I'm not comfortable doing that right now.

But I will share the goofy cover that my daughter and I made for this project.