It’s been a long, long time since I attempted to do NaNoWriMo. Usually, I have something else on my writing schedule which prevents me from taking off a month for another project. I think my last NaNoWriMo attempt was in 2013, but even then I was juggling that with another WIP, and the WIP won out.
This year, though, I’m trying something new and workshopping my current WIP, Queen of the Falconstar, through my writing group as I write it. Since I can only workshop up to 4k words per week, I’ve been lining up a sizeable backlog that already runs through the first week of November. In the next couple of weeks, I think I can line up writing group submissions through the whole month, which frees me up to work on something else.
Instead of a novel, though, I think I’m going to shoot for 50k words of short stories. My submissions queue has dwindled down to only four stories, and it looks like I’m going to end up publishing three of those in an anthology soon since they’ve pretty much exhausted the available markets. So I really need to write more short stories.
I’ve got a couple of stories planned, but not enough to fill all 50k words, so there’s going to be a fair amount of discovery writing going on. Hopefully that helps to throw my creative mind into a higher gear, which is kind of the point of NaNoWriMo in the first place: to show that writing under pressure can actually make you more creative. Since there are also five Sundays in November, and I make it a practice not to write professionally on Sundays, that amps up the pressure yet again, since it means that I need to write more than 2k words per day.
It’s going to be a challenge, and there’s a good chance that something will come up and I won’t be able to make it, but I’m shooting for it anyway. Wish me luck!
Good luck! 🙂