NaNoWriMo - Beaten by a Little Girl

I bet most of you didn’t know that November was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).  I didn’t participate, shoot, I didn’t know it existed until it had already started but my niece Hannah sure did.  Okay, this is really about a month later than I wanted to write it and I really ought to be writing something about Christmas, but so what?  

Anyway, the idea of NaNoWriMo is that during the month of November, all those folks who aspire to be writers and novelists (and who accept the challenge) write daily to accomplish the goal of writing 50,000 words.  Some like Christian blogger Kevin Hendricks failed in a very public way.  Others, like Hannah, persisted.  

 Even after I heard about the project and Hannah’s involvement in it, I wondered how I might stack up.  I don’t know if I’m cut out for novel writing.  I do have a few book ideas but I wouldn’t call any of them novels.  In any case, during the month of November I was writing my fool head off trying to answer a host of questions required for my ordination.  I was writing what felt like volumes, and on top of that,I was writing a sermon every week and visiting a model rocketry forum where I am a moderator.  With all this writing I thought I would compare favorably to this novel writing project so at the end of the month I added up all the words that I had written on various projects (it’s nice that MS Word does that for me or I probably wouldn’t have bothered).

Here is my tally:

Case Study: 1,788 words

Teaching Plan: 980 words

Autobiography: 1,168 words

Position papers: 7,168 words

Sermons

                11/7: 1,581

                11/14 2,350

                11/21 2,230

                11/28 1,794

This gives me a grand total of 19,059 words for the month of November and not even half of Hannah’s total.  Even worse, I borrowed most of my autobiography from when I had written another one three years ago and my sermons are composed of at least a third to a half (if not more) scripture (which I certainly did not write).  End result, I got done what needed to be done but got skunked by a little girl that’s barely old enough to be in high school.

Well done Hannah.