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NaNoWriMo 2025 Recap

I thoroughly failed this year, but I learned two connected lessons:

  1. I will always have distractions from writing.
  2. Writing projects require consistency.

Distractions in life are a given. Friends and family visit us, we go visit family, people randomly invite us to some local event, and unexpected projects appear. My own hobbies distract me from my other hobbies. So much can demand my time and attention, and I have to prioritize where to place my effort.

This November, I consistently chose to spend more time with family. We either had family visiting us or were visiting family for half of the month. While I worked hard to keep my novel attempt relevant, it eventually became unsustainable to achieve the required average pace to “win” NaNoWriMo. Because it’s a goal-oriented project, there’s a tipping point at which inspiration to work harder becomes a sense of hopelessness. I quit my novel around November 20th.

“Quitting” is an awful mental frame, though. What I actually did was accept that there was no way to write fifty thousand words—an arbitrary goal to achieve in a month—without sacrificing sleep and mostly writing gobbledygook. Because I began All These Things Are True with no preparation and little intention of writing a novel this month at all, it was intrinsically linked to November and NaNoWriMo. When I accepted failure in NaNoWriMo, my first instinct was to quit the book altogether. But that’s not how writing works. It takes time and consistency. I can’t sustain the 1,700 words a day necessary to “win” NaNo while writing something I can iterate on and be proud of. While I’ve achieved those fifty thousand words a few times, I never felt my writing improved from the effort. If I’m going to put my head down and craft a new world, explore characters, I should come out the other side having accomplished something beyond hitting a word count.

One thousand words a day—thirty thousand words in a month—is achievable without dramatically sacrificing other parts of my life. When I choose to write a novel, not because it’s part of a month-long sprint but because I have a story I want to tell and characters that compel me, I will do so at an appropriate pace. Consistency is important, and the base idea of maintaining a floor of words per day is useful, but it must be realistic.

I don’t know whether I’ll continue the core plot of All These Things Are True, pivot the story elsewhere, or begin a new project the next time the novel-writing bug hits. That’s not important compared to refining the process that works for me and maintaining engagement with my writing. My blog requires the same attention. There’s a tangible quality difference between posts I write in an hour because I need to get something out the door this week, and those I noodle over for a while as I consider their structure and proofread the final result.

Writing is tough. The older I get and the more experience I gain, the more I understand my own shortcomings as a writer and find new ways to improve. I’m not as fearless as I used to be, but the naivety of youth, while admirable, doesn’t yield better results on its own. It still requires the quiet, calm, consistent refining hand of experience. While I don’t literally subscribe to the adage of write drunk, edit sober, there’s something on the fringes of that idea I could take: write wildly, edit wisely.

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Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

The secret to writing is never held in a book explicitly about writing. Rather, it’s in the collective hours and thousands of pages spent reading anything one can get their hands on. It’s in the act of noticing how an author’s actions work, of forming opinions about whether a bit of prose succeeded in accomplishing its goal, so one can determine whether it’s a new tool to emulate or an ineffective path to avoid. Then, it’s in the act of writing. Of joyously beginning with a clear approach, then hitting heads against walls, falling into despair, becoming convinced the whole effort is worthless, and coming out the other side with a workable bit of narration. Do that over and over, while also reading, while also exploring the world, and one may just become a writer.

Yet, books on writing are still good for greasing the skids, pointing writers in the right writing direction, and providing necessary inspiration. Bird by Bird is one such lovely option for receiving a dose of reality from a working writer who believes in straightforward hard work and consistent effort, while acknowledging how easy that is for her to say when we all know there are long, drawn-out moments where writing is a slog and the worst feeling in the world. Reading Anne Lamott’s evening writing course, consolidated into a snappy, humorous book, is why I decided to try NaNoWriMo this November. And while that hasn’t gone exactly as planned—stay tuned for more next week—I’m grateful that I came across a book that spoke to me, one that I can return to for a nudge or a slap on the back or a bit of commiseration.

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Local LLM Thesaurus

It’s always more fun to work on something other than what I should explicitly be doing in the moment, so ideas and small projects naturally arise from procrastination. I was having trouble returning to my NaNoWriMo work after my sisters visited last weekend, and I took fifteen minutes to learn how to locally run an LLM.

My ninety percent use-case for LLMs is word refinement. While writing I will get a word stuck in my head, the wrong word for the exact feeling I’d like to describe. So, I tell some LLM (often Claude) to provide several more synonyms with varying connotations. This doesn’t rely on having up-to-date knowledge or internet access, so a nimble, offline, and local LLM would fit the task perfectly.

Somewhat ironically, I used an LLM to help me sort out what to do. It turns out this is a well-trod path. Here were my steps on my MacBook Air.

  1. Use Homebrew to install Ollama.
  2. Install my chosen model. I opted for mistral, so in a new window, I run ollama run mistral. Once it installs the first time, you can exit the instance.
  3. Run the Ollama server using ollama serve in my terminal. I leave this running.
  4. Install the app Enchanted from the Mac App Store. It’s a free project designed to provide a modern front-end to your local LLM instance. This just worked for me without any setup. It automatically detected my local Ollama instance.
  5. I used Enchanted to create a “Completion” in their app, allowing me to create a shortcut to run with a few key strokes. I select a word, and my completion appends that word to the query: “Give me some synonyms for this word with varrying connotations: text inserted here“.

That’s all it took. I had a local model running in fewer than fifteen minutes. I don’t need to pay for anything, and it perfectly fits what I need most of the time.

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Broadway Folks Know What They’re Doing

Erin and I saw Harry Potter and Cursed Child at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway last weekend. I did not anticipate the depth and detail of any component of that experience, and I left more fully appreciating what can make high-end theater so incredible.

First, there’s the environment. While I theoretically knew that a show would take over a single theater for the duration of its run, I did not play that out to its conclusion. Everything about the Lyric—the lobby decor, concessions, how people dressed, how they talked to you, the merchandise—was created knowing that they had a Harry Potter show. No corner was left untouched by this knowledge, and in hindsight, that’s obvious. I bought Butterbeer, and our in-seat delivery order during intermission included a complimentary chocolate frog. All of that was a significant first step towards immersion.

Second, the effects were literally magical. I could anticipate some stagecraft and see the crew dressed in all black sneaking around, sure. It’s a stage play; that’s tier one set movement and visuals. At tier 2, we have on-stage costume changes, disappearances, and magical spells that I don’t know the precise mechanism for, but could hazard a few guesses. They were explicable. Then, there are those rare tier 3 effects that blew me away. They warped what I could see on stage during the Time Turner transitions. I still have no clue how they did it. I was spellbound.

Finally, there is something about the best available actors, their stage presence and ability to manipulate an audience, which makes everything feel real and believable within the fiction of the play. I’ve seen amateur shows that accomplished this at a small scale—difficult, sensitive two-person plays, for example—but such an enormous cast rendering what amounts to a wild bit of fan fiction entirely committed to their roles was magnificent.

These aren’t groundbreaking revelations, but even a single show helped me understand what’s available in this art form I don’t often think about. I’m excited to see a different show, likely a musical, and continue to be amazed by humanity’s talent.

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My 2025 NaNoWriMo Plan

NaNoWriMo, the organization, is on the ropes, or perhaps entirely dead, after a change in focus and an AI-related public relations snafu. None of that affects my plan for participating in the core of the event: writing at least 50,000 words in a month.

I initially wrote this post with the intention of delaying NaNoWriMo until February. This November will be hectic: I’m transitioning roles at work, we have visitors for two long weekends, followed immediately by a trip home for Thanksgiving. The likelihood that I will write 50,000 cohesive words in November is slim.

That’s not the point.

As I sit here on October 31, watching World Series Game 6, and coming across the NaNo 2.0 site, I’m inclined to go against my better judgment. NaNoWriMo is about the joy of creativity, about pushing oneself to find the thrill of a terrible first draft, of freely exploring a new world with a cast of characters that grow with you during a month of hectic composition.

A benefit of revisiting morning pages is that I already have a loose habit of writing in the morning. Sure, it’s a stream of consciousness, but I’ve made that time available.

And here’s the other thing: attempting it in November doesn’t stop me from focusing on writing again in February. Maybe I’ll start another new project—they’re fun and exciting and full of potential!—or maybe I’ll finally sit down and seriously tackle editing and rewriting my promising beginnings. This is a hobby; I do it for fun. None of this matters except insofar as I find it engaging and fulfilling.

So, let’s do NaNoWriMo again. You can find my progress on my NaNoWriMo page, per usual.

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Boston!

This month’s expedition took Erin and me to Boston for a conference she was attending. While the highlight of the trip was getting to spend time with our friends from San Francisco, that’s what we call out of scope. I’ll focus on what I loved while roaming around the city.

Continue reading “Boston!”
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Book Review: “Sophie’s Choice” is Oscar Bait

I read three other books between the day I began Sophie’s Choice and when I completed it. It was among the strangest books I’ve read: it had moments of pure drudgery, of self-indulgence, of compelling storytelling, of discomfort, of confusion, of literary triumph. When I reached the moment of the titular choice, all my struggles through the purple prose and plodding details felt worthwhile. But at that moment of completion, I had no words to describe my experience. Only a few months later did my feelings, and this post’s title, coalesce.

William Styron’s style in Sophie’s Choice is so over the top that, if considered as satire, it could be a true comedic masterpiece. The book reads as a fantasy version of Styron’s own youth: a self-absorbed aspiring writer in New York meets a beautiful Polish Catholic who spent time in a concentration camp during World War II, along with her bipolar, drug-addled boyfriend. Various tales of drinking, sexual fantasy, and flashbacks from characters other than our sole narrator are described in impossible detail.

The book is a beautiful slog. It’s the written version of a show recommended by a friend, with the caveat that after the first two seasons, it gets really good. It’s a writer throwing the dictionary and thesaurus and hypothetical notes from decades of therapy he never attended, empowered by the immense security provided to a middle-aged white man working on a novel in the 1980s. It’s fascinating and frustrating in the ideas it seems to put forth, its explicit detail, its erudite and overdone diction, and the surprising success of the overall story despite everything that could inspire a frustrated reader to put down the book and never return.

Sophie’s Choice is a book worth reading and studying both for its content and for its context. It’s the work of a writer who appears to write with intention, yet that intention is crafting their ideal opus to win an award rather than to say something from within.

I still don’t know whether I recommend this book, but it sure is one I’d love to take a class about, or listen to a panel of authors with a variety of backgrounds discuss it. I’ve since moved on to my usual stack of science fiction, but Sophie’s Choice was a worthwhile challenge that will stick with me.