Well, not exactly. It's a first draft. The rough words, which now will be formed into a diamond. I participated in the national novel writing month or short NaNoWriMo, where people from all over the world come together and set themselves the goal to write 50'000 words within the month of November. This makes 1'667 words per day. Having trouble getting the work on your essay for school done? After NaNoWriMo this won't happen again. There is no price for winners or anything, it's all about getting people to write and to finally start working on their long-dreamed projects. That's exactly what I did.
The idea the write a book has been in my mind since forever and just a week before I've had the idea to do a short sprint of 3'000 words for ten days to get started. I had never heard of NaNoWriMo before until I stumbled upon it by accident on the 1st November. Now or never, and my odyssey began. In the beginning I mostly stuck to the minimum word count per day, but slowly I began writing more. It was not enough of a challenge for me, so in the second week I set my personal goal to 5'000 words per day. This was definitely not easy anymore. There were times, where every word felt like a fight and I would take a look at my daily wordcount every couple hundred words. It was torture but there were also other times, where the words were just flowing onto the paper. I especially remember one 90min session, where I managed 4'500 words.
But I wasn't only writing on my book; on the side I was still writing articles and lots of other stuff, which led to an overexertion of my left wrist. At one point I was in so much pain, I couldn't write anymore with my left hand but there were still 500 words left to write so I did what everyone would do: I continued only using my right hand. While the word sprints, where you try to write as much as possible within a given time, were the best thing ever in terms for motivation and getting words down, I clearly did too many of them. I hate writing slowly. Why slow down, when you can go fast? I paid the price for it and even over a week later I still have to be careful to not write too much or too fast.
Afterall, the fifteen days it took me to reach the 50'000 words were pure bliss and showed me once again how much I love writing. Even more, when I wasn't able to anymore. 50'000 words are hard to grasp, it doesn't really sound like that much but actually it's over 100 pages in word with Arial sized 11 and more than 320'000 characters. Formated into a book this makes 150 to 200 pages but first comes the editing. This will take a while because I'm an underwriter, there's a lot of descriptions to be added now besides the editing of all the sentences.
What's my book about, you may ask? It's about my experiences as a solo traveller. I took all the best stories that happened during the last seven years since I started travelling and started writing them down. Some of them are unbelievable, some I may have told to you before but what all of them have in common: they show the positive sides of the world. The chosen stories did not only have to be entertaining for other people but me, I also focused on showing different cultural backgrounds. At the moment the book contains 21 short stories, a couple of them definitely PG18. On my list I have ten other stories to be written down, but time will tell what makes it into the book and what not. There is still a long road to go, but I'm very much looking forward to finish this book and later publish it.
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