I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month, commonly known as NaNoWriMo. If you’ve found this page, congratulations! That means you’re now able to keep track of what I’m writing, for better or worse.
2023
My announcement—with a bit of waffling over whether this is even a good idea this year—can be found here. I’ll be going back to the content from 2021, based around my game The Last Question.
Updates to the first story I’m working on this year, Solar, can be found here.
Updates to the second story I’m working on this year, Naught, can be found here.
Updates to the third story I’m working on this year, Bound, can be found here.
2022
As discussed here, I’m writing NaNoWriMo 2022 by hand. This means there won’t be a PDF right now. As of updating this page (November 23, 2022) I’m rather far behind any imaginable goal as well.
2021
You can view a LaTeX-rendered PDF of my 2021 NaNoWriMo project here, and the project page for it here (although I believe you’ll need an account to view it.)
As I have stated in the announcement post, the goal of this project is to write drafts of at least six short stories, one for each of the main character types in my Last Question RPG.
While I’m writing everything in Markdown, I learned that the excellent desktop editor Typora combined with pandoc supports Markdown to LaTeX conversion. I may still tweak some of the settings more, but the main benefit is that I don’t need to manually figure out how to turn all of my *italics* into \emph{italics}.
2020
Update January 18, 2021: This fell out of my mind. Links to the two stories I wrote: Story 1, Story 2
Update November 5: I decided against doing NaNoWriMo in full this year. I’m behind on some reading I’d like to do, and just don’t have the mental bandwidth to spend my free time writing. I may delay to doing it another month, but we will see. Instead, I’m going to try and write 2 short stories this month. Short stories are a medium that I find fascinating, and want more practice with. They can be so delicious and powerful, but in my mind require much more craft than a novel. So the amount of work will be high, but focused on different aspects.
I’ll be doing NaNoWriMo again this year. While I have a potential story that I am excited about, given the state of the world I’m not sure I’ll have it in me to commit to writing a straight up novel. I may instead write a series of text adventures, or perhaps one very large interactive fiction book in Twine. We’ll see. You can come back for more details once the month gets started.
2019
You can view a PDF of my NaNoWriMo project for 2019 here. I’ll update it at the end of each day. Two things to note about this: (1) I’m just clicking “export” in the Markdown editor I’m using, and so there are no page breaks between chapters and in general the typesetting is sub-par. If I ever finish the entire work, then I suppose I’ll bother typesetting it in LaTeX, but for now hang in there. And (2) the page numbering may not be consistent. (Of course there aren’t actually page numbers on the document itself.) I reserve the right to go back and add (or remove) previous material, so just be aware of that if you decide to try reading it.
The work is largely inspired (and named after) the first text adventure I wrote. (Update 11/9: If you bother to read what’s there so far, the connection will be nearly impossible to make out beyond the amnesia. But hey, that’s why writers use the word “inspired”.)
This page is not an invitation for feedback, as the point of NaNoWriMo is to just hit a word count over the course of a month; it’s meant to practice not editing, which is not something I’m excellent at.
I’m doing this as a challenge to myself, so encouragement is welcome! Otherwise, feel free to keep track of it, and experience what garbage gets written when you’re just trying to hit a word count and not delete anything you write.