NaNoWriMo 2022
There were a few years where I would blog regularly. Back when I was in college and before I was writing professionally I’d put a few hundred words on a personal blog on a weekly basis. The main reason I stopped was just feeling stretched too thin (like butter and bread and such).
I don’t know how different things are now, but I figured if I was going to take another crack at it, I might as well try during November when my ambition so frequently exceeds my reach. (Also, I’m paying a monthly fee for this website so I should make regular use of it.)
For those not in the know, November is National Novel Writing Month (or “NaNoWriMo” for short). Every year when November rolls around, writers spend the month writing a new novel. At the end of the month they are — ideally — left with 50,000 of story that they pray might be mildly coherent.
It’s like a Christmas present that you make for yourself. But it’s November. And there are a lot more sleepless nights. And canceled plans. And tears (don’t worry, the tears are normally from staring at a screen for hours at a time while also not getting sleep.)
I’ve tried to do NaNoWriMo (or “NaNo” for short) a handful of times in the past, but have only hit the word count goal twice, and only one of those two times has so far led to a work that I’m really happy with.
Under more usual circumstances, I would aim to continue working on the novel I only ended up getting about 25,000 words into last year and have only tweaked occasionally since then. (That text is a sea fairing fantasy story meant to be reminiscent of the Mediterranean Sea.) This is not a typical year, though, since — hopefully you’ve noticed — I’ve (re)published my debut novel, the first book in an intended series.
It is strange because the world of “Light Keeper Chronicle” is one that I’ve been intending to return to when I could get the book published and now that it’s as polished and trimmed as its ever likely to get, I’m just left to decide when I want to go back to that world.
There’s a good chance that ends up happening now as a we start November. I have about 70,000 words of a sequel already written, and that word count is only a couple thousand words below the final word count of the first “Light Keeper Chronicle” book. Bearing this in mind though: that version of the book is a sequel to an older draft of the text and, I’ll add, that sequel draft was already longer than what it should be (even accounting for the long page count of previous drafts of the first book).
In all probability, now that I have the first book where I want it, I’ll be diving into book two this month to make headway on a text that has had at least a few people waiting on a completed sequel for more than a decade.
As of writing this, I haven’t decided fully what I’m going to do this year for NaNo (or “No,” for short), I imagine that’s something I’ll be post on here about in the near future.
For the moment I’m going to hesitantly commit to making blog posts on the first Tuesday of the month. It would be great to at some point to post once per week, but we’ll have to see how things end up going.
Until next time I wish you well and if you’re a writer pursuing No this year, I hope you write with the wind ever at your back!