A first draft in just over a month?

Like so many others, I always thought I had a book inside me that needed to be written. Oddly enough, this first novel is not that book. At the urging of a friend, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The goal was 50,000 words in 30 days.

I had always thought about "my" book as a work of non-fiction rather than a novel, but the stated goal of NaNoWriMo is a work of fiction. I considered bending the rules briefly, but then thought that attempting fiction first would bring more life and story telling to an eventual work of non-fiction.

Now all I needed was a story...