NaNoWriMo 2019

It’s November again! That means I, along with hundreds of thousands of other writers, will be jamming out a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo three times before, and each time, I upped the ante. In 2016, my goal was just to finish a story, which ended up less than 30,000 words. In 2017, I made myself write no less than 1,000 words every day. In 2018, I aimed for and reached 50,000 with a junk novel, using the sense of fun to motivate myself to meet the daily goal. And now in 2019, I’m going all in. This year, not only am I aiming for 50,000 words by the end of the month, I am writing the first draft of a story that I want to continue to work on afterward, and aim to get published.

That’s right, I’m about to start my first book that I’m aiming to publish. Goodbye fanfictions and practice stories, the real game is beginning!

This book’s working title is Earthbound: A Galactic Odyssey. It’s a hard science fiction story taking place a million years in the future. Inspired by Isaac Arthur’s video, “Hitchhiking the Galaxy,” humanity’s first gardener ship has seeded colonies to the edge of the Milky Way, and is ready to head off for the Large Magellanic Cloud. One of its citizens, an augmented, immortal human, decides he would really like to see Earth again. The story follows him as he travels back across the galaxy at slower-than-light speeds, revisiting some of the civilizations that have grown out of the colonies he helped plant. There will be space ships, AI, technology, speculative societies, and all kinds of futuristic stuff, almost all grounded in known science and realistic speculation.

Since it is intended to be a full-on adult sci-fi novel, chances are high it will end up much longer than 50,000 words, and take longer than one month to finish a full draft.

The writer’s group I was in last year didn’t work out, but I found a new one, which looks promising. Hopefully, this group can stick together, and we can give each other the feedback and energy we need in order to succeed as authors. If any of you from NaNo and Beyond are reading this, hi! Here’s to realizing our dreams!