No NaNo This Year

My latest WIP

Well, November and National Novel Writing Month have been and gone. It's now December, so I can technically enjoy the Christmas decorations and songs (not too mention a few seasonal freebies at my lodgings this coming week).

Anyway, as stated above, November is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short. This annual writing challenge involves writing 50,000 words in 30 days. Not always easy when life gets in the way. My relationship with the tradition has been...interesting to say the least.

I tried NaNo back in 2016, and managed 34,000 words, but realised that I have a rather laconic writing style which is more suited to short stories. I was working at that time, but I had Fridays and the weekends to catch up if I fell behind. Regardless, I decided it probably wasn't for me.

When November came around again in 2017, I was working in another job which was full-time. Since I'd been struggling with fitting my writing around the new hours, I elected not to do the actual challenge, but pay lip service and try and write every day. Even if it was making a plan at work. I kind of managed, but wasn't able to keep it up afterwards.

This year, I've been at university and have had assignments due in November. I would argue that the point of the challenge is to teach you to write every day, but I'm pretty much doing that anyway, so I didn't bother with anything NaNo-related this year. It's mainly been my journal and the creative assignments.

However, since a lot of my output lately has been poetry, I'm tempted to do National Poetry Writing Month in April. Since there isn't a word count goal, I think that allows a lot more flexibility.

I'll speak about that in April.

Happy writing.