Ready for NaNoWriMo? Go!

National Novel Writing Month (which gets shortened to NaNoWriMo, for reasons I find utterly incomprehensible) has been moved to April this year. That means it's time to get started. Check the NaNoWriMo site for help, advice, and tools to track your progress -- or, if you're the sort of person who prefers to do things on their own, just started writing! Can you finish your novel in a month?

Ready... set... go!

NaNoWriFAIL Addendum

So, it turns out that my writing speed increases drastically when I'm not being asked about Lego Star Wars, getting ice water with a straw and a lid, or being assaulted with toy lightsabers. This should surprise exactly nobody.

NaNoWriFAIL

I'm not participating in NaNoWriMo, mainly because there's no way I can do that which wouldn't result in my entire family turning feral and scavenging through the neighborhood for food and clean clothing, before returning to the foul nest that our house had become.

But, if I were participating, here's what my numbers would look like:

Total time spent writing: Two Hours, Forty-Five Minutes.
Total Writing Accomplished: A section title and four paragraphs, totaling 249 words.

Seriously, it has taken me over two hours to produce four paragraphs.

Why is it always November?

November has been a strange month, at least for the last couple of years. I mean, sure - it has Thanksgiving (here in the States), but it's also National Novel Writing Month, and "Mo-vember" - when otherwise-sensible people decide to grow mustaches in order to raise awareness, or money, for some issue or other. (Possibly just facial hair; I can never remember.)

Now, Thanksgiving is logistically nightmarish, but the actual family get-togethers are fun. So we'll be doing that.

Mo-vember, obviously, is Not My Thing. I don't do mustaches, not by themselves, and if there's a cause I particularly want to support I tend to donate directly. So that's out.

This pretty much leaves NaNoWriMo. On the face of it, it seems like exactly the sort of thing I ought to take part in. Write your novel with the help and support of your friends, family, and complete strangers on the Internet! Settle in and really work on your draft! Put some actual time and effort into that thing you always said you were going to do!

...I won't be doing it. If Thanksgiving is a logistical nightmare, NaNoWriMo is a logistical impossibility. I could devote enough time to writing to finish a rough draft, probably... but the house would be a disaster, the boys would have disowned me, my wife would quite probably have killed me out of aggravated aggravation, and likely as not I wouldn't be employed anymore.

I like being employed. It means I get to eat.

I like being able to eat.

So, yeah: I'll be writing. I'm always writing. I'll even be working on a novel-length project - but again, nothing too unusual there. I will not, however, be participating in NaNoWriMo. I just don't have it in me.

NaNoWriMo? No.

I'm not taking part in National Novel Writing Month. If you read this blog, or follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you've probably already figured this out. (It's actually pretty easy to tell: if you're participating in NaNoWriMo, you've been obsessing over your word count for a week, now. If you aren't taking part, you're allowed to talk about other things. See? Easy.)

It's not that it doesn't sound like fun. Actually, the idea of devoting an entire month to a single writing project sounds kind of appealing. If your main problem is staying focused, NaNoWriMo could be a really big help. Unfortunately for me, the things that interfere in my writing-longer-projects aren't the sort of things that can be solved by "making more time for writing" or "making writing more of a priority". Yes, if writing was more of a priority for me, I could probably get a book written - or rewritten. All I'd have to do is, say, quit my job - that would vastly increase my writing time. Or I could quit taking care of my kids, and stay at the office or the library or something until after they were in bed. I'd get a lot more writing done that way, too.

But that's the problem: my time is finite, and writing isn't my only priority. It's definitely a priority - I'd be a basket case if I weren't at least putting things up on the Blog o' Doom, here - but I have other priorities, too. Staying gainfully employed? That's a big one. Not dumping all the child-raising responsibilities on my wife? That's another one. On a related note, how about not missing out on our boys' childhoods? Ditto. Martial Arts are still a priority, but guess what? They're even less important than writing, so I haven't managed to fit them in for about five years, now.

So, no NaNoWriMo for me. If I can't get novels written in the normal course of events, buckling down to write one in a month isn't going to help - and it'll probably just add stress to an already busy existence.

National Novel Writing Month

Here's why I don't participate in NaNoWriMo. I just went back to work on one of my projects. It's a book-length idea. Probably the first in a series, actually. (I've talked about it before - it's the "other project" mentioned in this post.)

I have eight pages done. So, y'know, so far, so good. Especially since I started writing it towards the end of October...

...2009.

No, that's not depressing AT ALL.

But you know what? I'm not going to sit here and tell you why it takes absolutely bloody forever to get any writing projects done. Instead, I'm going to take the time I have now, and see if I can at least fill page nine.

So what about you? Working on anything for NaNoWriMo? Got any other projects - writing, artistic, crafty - that you'd like to talk about? Comments are open.