I’ve decided to fully participate in NaNoWriMo this year. You can track my progress over on the NaNoWriMo page of this blog.
I first attempted National Novel Writing Month in 2019. While I did “win” that year, I am not happy with what it produced. It was a fun writing exercise and a good challenge, but in hindsight, I didn’t accomplish what I wanted.
Last year, I spent time planning out a story. Both inspired and horrified by the events surrounding George Floyd in Minneapolis, I had many ideas for expressing my reactions. But due to a lot of moving around in the fall, I couldn’t commit to writing for an hour or two every day. Instead, I wrote two short stories for a total word count well below the targeted 50,000.
I’m planning ahead again this year, and have committed to finding the time to write. I will be writing at least six short stories as background to my Last Question RPG, and have put last year’s planning into an “Ideas” backlog folder. These stories will be rough, as expected, but they will not be aimless. If they have a clear purpose and direction, I’ll have improved on my 2019 experience.
Because of all this writing, I won’t make guarantees about how much blogging I’ll do. I have a few ideas already for simple posts, and I may use my NaNoWriMo experience to pad out content. It doesn’t concern me though, because it will be a month of writing regardless, and I’m happy to give myself the space to accomplish this goal.