For several years now I have been aware of, and fascinated by, National Novel Writing Month. Because of my other website, JamesAxler.com I have gotten to know several published authors over the past fifteen years, and then there is my friend Michael Montoure who has been a writer for as long as I have known him (you should check out his website Bloodletters.com and also pick up his new book Permanent Damage, it's really good). I had never considered myself a writer -- I have the same issue as Spalding Gray, I don't know how to make anything up -- but over the course of my son's life I found myself first writing in a personal journal and then later actually writing these public blog posts about his entire Snow White experience. After the big final night of Snow White's Scary Adventures, and after I wrote the series of posts that gathered so much attention, I began telling people that I was working on a book about the whole thing.  It even had a title: "3,500: An Autistic Boy's Ten Year Romance With Snow White". But as much as I talked about writing the book, I never actually sat down and did it.

Finally as November was approaching I was reminded of #NaNoWriMo and decided that, dang it, I was actually going to take part in the challenge and write that book.

Knocking out a few paragraphs every week for a blog post is pretty easy, and even with that I had fallen off schedule for much of this year (I blog every Monday at JamesAxler.com and every Wednesday at Shmoolok.com). In order to prepare for the novel writing challenge, first I challenged myself to actually get back on schedule with my blogs regardless of whether or not anyone was reading them. And so, throughout October I pushed myself and kept to my deadlines publishing two new posts each week on schedule. Then, when November 1st came around I dove in on the book.

It's more than a little daunting to commit yourself to writing 50,000 words in thirty days. I had thought through the structure of the book many times, but actually committing to the act of putting real words down on paper (well, a Word document, same difference) was more than a little stressful. But each day went by, and each day I made the time to place my butt in a chair and my fingers on a keyboard and just bang it  out without stressing over whether or not it was "good enough". My biggest fear was that I would start strong and then fizzle out after a few days. My next biggest fear was that I would commit to 50K words and then find out that I only had something like 10K words in me, not nearly enough to call it a book. As it turns out (at least thus far) I needn't have worried on either count.

Two weeks into the project, I now stand at nearly 21,000 words written and I am right on pace to reach my goal by the end of the month. At 2/5 of the way through my target word count, I have only just reached the point in the story where we are about to move to Florida. In other words, of those 3,500 rides that the book is talking about, only about a dozen have actually happened yet. Ahead of me still lies the tales of SW1K, SW2K, SW2K Redux, Ben's long illness and hospitalization, SW3K, and then the big finish at 3.5K.  At this point I have no doubt that I will reach my goal of 50K words by the end of the month. I actually wonder whether I will be anywhere near the end of the book by that point because I have so much story left to tell.

The night before last I actually sat down and read through my entire progress so far, so see how well it paced out. It definitely reads like a first draft; there are typos I need to circle back and fix, structurally there are a few things I need to tweak and move around for the sake of flow, and there are a few small bits that I need to go back and expand on. But overall? It was a good read. I am actually pretty dang proud of it so far, and I really do believe that at the end of this process I will have a book that other people will actually enjoy reading.

Currently my goal is to complete the first draft before my wife and I leave on vacation on December 7th. Because I have a ton of accrued vacation time at work I am essentially taking off the entire month of December, so after we get back from our two weeks in the U.K. I intend to spend much of the remaining month working on the second draft. By January 2nd I intend to have a manuscript that is ready for line and copy editing (in addition to several authors, I know at least two professional editors). In parallel with all of that, I am also working with an artist to complete a cover design for the book.

If everything stays on track, then I will start sending out advance review copies of 3,500 by early spring, and have it available for sale on all of the major e-book retailers shortly thereafter, and hopefully available as print-on-demand as well. Every single penny of revenue from the book will go into the Special Needs Trust I set up for Ben earlier this year. That is the real reason I am even doing this, to find a way to allow Ben to achieve some kind of financial independence by sharing his own story. I don't know if it will wind up only earning him pocket change, or if it will catch fire and actually build up a real financial cushion for him. Of course I have fantasies that it gets picked up and becomes a New York Times Bestseller and goes on to sell millions of copies. But even if it only sells a dozen copies to family and friends, the entire process has been worth it.