I’ve added a page for NaNoWriMo 2013.  You can find the link at the menu up top.  Rather than bore the people who read this blog with regular updates, I’m going to place updates and the occasional excerpt there.  That way if anyone is interested in reading about the experience, you can find it there.  I will post at least once a week (hopefully more often), but I don’t think it will be the same day every week.  I’ve got too much traveling to do to be that consistent.

I’ve been debating this for a few weeks, and I’ve finally decided that I’m going to give NaNoWriMo a try this year.  I participated two years ago and managed to finish a novel, although it’s not in any shape to be seen at the moment.  I gave the program a pass last year because I had too much on my plate.

I suspect that’s the case this year.  I’m seriously behind on some review commitments, and there are some blog posts I need to write that require some research.  Plus there’s a blogging announcement in the post that immediately follows this one.  But I don’t want to limit my writing to blogging.  Don’t get me wrong.  Blogging is a lot of fun, but I want to write fiction as well.  Writing a blog post is a lot easier than writing fiction, though, and I tend to take the easy way out when I’m tired or there are too many interruptions.  Participating in NaNoWriMo will force me to make fiction writing a priority.  I hope.

I’m going to deviate from the stated guidelines in NaNoWriMo, though.  You see, the problem is that I don’t have a novel ready to go.  I’ve got a crime novel I want to write, but it’s still in the gestation stage.  I need a secondary plot to screw up the schemes of the main characters, and that hasn’t come together yet.  I could write the sequel to the novel I wrote two years ago, but I need to work out some details of the worldbuilding that will become problematic in the second installment.  Plus, I just need to clean up the first draft.

So what I’m going to do is write a novel’s worth of short fiction.  For NaNoWriMo, I recall that being 50k.  I tried to check a few minutes ago, and the site was down for maintenance.  Anyway, I’ve got a list of short story ideas that could fill a book.  I need to get started on them.

There have to be some ground rules, though.  To keep from violating the spirit of the program, all stories need to be completed in November, start to finish.  In other words, works in progress aren’t allowed.  Otherwise, I’d just work on the deep space disaster novel.  Any progress I make on something I’ve already started will be in addition to what I do for NaNoWriMo.

The advantage of writing short fiction is that if I get stuck, I can just work on something else for a while.  I’m something of an organic writer to begin with, so this approach works for me.  I may not make it, but I’m going to try.  I’ll keep you posted on how things go.