First, because not everyone knows what it stands for, NaNoWriMo is National Novel 
Writing Month. The objective is to write a novel, consisting of 50,000 words, during the thirty days of November.
Something to keep in mind–50,000 is at the low end of word counts for a novel. To give a comparison, novellas go up to around 40,000. Most novels, at least in Urban Fantasy–the genre I’m currently writing–come in somewhere between 85,000-100,000.
My opinion on NaNo is that it’s good for writing a rough draft.
So, I’m unofficially doing this. I say unofficially because I’m not signed up at the website (nanowrimo.org), and I’m not trying to ‘win’. I’m mostly curious to see if I can do it, and to get my head back into writing mode. Three or four months with little-to-no writing is not the best thing for me, and it’s possible that I would’ve been in a better headspace if I’d been writing, considering the circumstances.
In the past, I never tried NaNo because I was always in the middle of trying to write and finish a story or revise a draft. This time, I wanted to let the first story sit a bit before really jumping into revisions, and I decided to start on the second and get a draft of that done. Though even if I do hit the target, I expect to be maybe halfway through the story.
50,000 words in thirty days breaks down to 1,667 words a day. I started the month lagging behind because two days without power and heat make writing difficult. Not because I couldn’t recharge my laptop–like I’ve said before, I write with pen and notebook. The problem was more that no heat meant trying to write with cold fingers. Writing-wise, the power outage only affected knowing the actual word count. Saturday was a minimal writing day–there were errands to be run–and I don’t write on Sundays. That’s the day I do laundry and play games and generally relax. Most Saturdays I write more than enough words to make up for Sunday.
Overall, I have 6,350 words, not counting Friday (those aren’t typed up, but should be around 1,000), and I should be at 15,003 (including Friday, but not today).
I’m not worrying about that. I tend to do the majority of my writing on Friday nights and Saturdays when I have larger blocks of time to spend writing. My typical daily goal is 500, and I can write at least that much in thirty minutes at lunch. While I can write 2,000 on a weekday, those days tend to be rare, and they’re days when I don’t exercise and have no other distractions. Plus, the clearer an idea I have about what’s going to happen, the more I write.
And I write less when I use my writing time on blog posts. Which, yes, means I should be writing instead of doing this.
So, I will write.
