First Day of Preptober 2020

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Abraham Lincoln

If there’s been any year in our lifespan that has afforded us more opportunity to write, I can’t think of a single one. Holed up in our homes, the availability of alone time has been plentiful and we have a myriad of current events acting as fodder for our creative minds.

On this, the first day of Preptober, I’ve debated with my internal man about finishing a fledgling novel that’s been in the pipeline for years or starting from scratch as I normally do during NaNoWriMo. On one hand, devoting my time to an open project where I will see forward movement is enticing but starting a project at the very beginning is always a challenge I love.

This week, I’ve run the gambit of emotions as I finished up September and readied myself to spend the entirety of October prepping for our 30 days of writing.

As my readers know, I use Scrivener to plan, make notations, create timelines, and ultimately write. The husband and I recently purchased a NAS in order to save our files and last week I began the arduous task of moving every single file over to the new system.

The move was almost complete when I got to my writing folders. My Short Stories transferred flawlessly but when it came time to move my massive Novels file, I received an error message stating the entire folder was corrupted. I could not open a single novel, note, piece of research or submissions spreadsheet. I was mortified to say the least.

Three days, many hours spent on Google trying to fix the problem, and a few pieces of recovery software later, I chalked it up to a loss. This morning, I was staring at the offending file at my computer and thought, “How would I try to fix this if I didn’t have Google?”

I right clicked the file, went to properties, then ran a scan in tools. When Microsoft informed me the file had problems I rolled my eyes and clicked the close box. Another box appeared asking if I wanted the computer to fix the file. With trepidation I clicked yes and immediately, my file was accessible.

Y’all. I beat Google.

All that being said, I now have access to all of my half-finished projects again and I feel like this year should be about bringing something to completion. With all of the tumultuous events that 2020 has brought about, it makes sense that this would be the year I see a NaNoWriMo to the end. Make lemonade out of lemons, I suppose.

I’ll come to the decision tomorrow morning about how to best utilize NaNoWriMo to complete a rough draft. Right now, I have three options:

• Start brand new
• Continue with my highest word count project (43584 words)
• Continue with my most loved project (8385 words)

I’m leaning towards the third choice as I’m very interested to see which direction the story goes and learn more about how to pen a whodunit (It’s a cozy mystery I started last NaNoWriMo.)

Now that my children are one year older, I feel like I have more of a chance to complete the 50k word count goal this time around. A clingy two and four year old really put a damper on my writing last November. I remember telling myself to write after they had gone to bed but to be honest, at the end of the day I was exhausted and fell into dreamland and soon as my head hit the pillow.

I have a roadmap for October’s planning schedule and I’ll expound upon it in more posts as the month tromps on.

My first goal is, as mentioned above, to determine which project I will be working on this year. Tomorrow’s post will bring about that answer and I wait, with baited breath, to see what I will choose.

Feel free to leave a comment here and let me know what you plan on doing for this year’s NaNoWriMo. You can also like my Facebook page to see more insight into my writing life.