I am not participating in NaNoWriMo this year. Last year, I took some rather timid steps into NaNoWriMo — which is to say I signed up on the site. I didn’t provide a name (Did I want to use a pseudonym?) or project title (Which did I want to write?). I did, however, start writing. I did not reach the officially sanctioned 50,000-word target, but I did put down some 7,000 words or so....
This was what took me off of the NaNoWriMo path, but has been a very rewarding experience. It’s a privilege to work with Katherine M. Lawrence. This first novelette is but the beginning. Cold Saké.
No, I did not reach the 50,000-word floor that NaNoWriMo puts out there as a goal for sprint-writing in November. I didn’t come close. (4,286 is the count, to be exact.) But I don’t care, for two reasons: I spent much of my writing time editing the manuscript of someone else’s novelette. (More on that soon.) Writing is about process, not about distance. I embraced the NaNoWriMo endeavor not so much to see if I have the right stuff to blast out 50k words in 30 days....
They’re two different jobs. I’ve been doing a bit of both this month. On the one hand, NaNoWriMo isn’t really happening for me. On the other hand, I’m helping a novelette get published, and I think it’s pretty good work. So that’s good.
I’ve been writing for decades, but I haven’t turned a sustained effort towards fiction in ages. I guess blogging and work and other things have kept me busy enough. But they don’t satisfy me like writing. So I’ve been turning some of my intention towards writing a novel I have in mind. That’s why I created this blog here. And I created it on Wordpress.com so I won’t get distracted by designing and developing this blog itself....