Last November, I was even more of a rebel than usual in that instead of having a goal of writing so many words per day, my goal was ‘reading for writing.’ I wasn’t going to track it, since I wasn’t writing, but it turns out that there is a ratio of time spent per word count, so I did that. It meant I read two hours a day, not the 20-30 minutes I had planned on originally. Also, I kept the habit of looking for sentences that grabbed my interest, although I’m not continuing any longer with the weekly goal of finding three inspiring sentences and rewriting them to be my thoughts. I figure I’ll do some of that going forward, but don’t have to be so deliberate about it.
This November I’m going back to having a writing goal, but not a novel. Mainly because I’m in the middle of a novel that is going quite well, so 1) don’t want to start a new project and get distracted from that and, 2) it’s in a series and half-written so going crazy with the first draft would be counter-productive and, 3) I’ve done the ‘write a first draft in November’ many times so it doesn’t really feel like an accomplishment. I may do that again some year, especially if I’m not in the middle of the first draft of a project, and maybe if it’s something outside my normal stuff. I still like some of the ideas in ‘Alien Flag of Surrender’ which was something I came up with the year I wrote 200,000 words in November. But not this year.
I was going to give NaNoWriMo a miss like I did two years ago, but with the pandemic making write-ins on-line and limiting social interaction, and November being one of the darkest months of the year, it seemed like participating would be a good idea. But how? After thinking about it, I decided that this could be a good year to do all the what-do-you-want in life questions including remembering your past that I’ve thought might be fun to do. I’ve been gathering prompts from “Poemcrazy” and “The Gift of a Year” and various things that cross my path. The idea is to write on at least one topic every day, probably long-hand. And then I’ll do some other writing, maybe not long-hand since I’m not sure I can write 1500 words a day without my hand hurting. Also, there is a type of thinking that I do with a keyboard that is slightly different than with a pen in hand.
Since I’m a morning person, that’s when I do most of my writing. But the write-ins are in the evenings. So, I’m going to participate in some/many of those and get ahead on my word count for the next day. Hey, as a rebel, I can do that as well. I think the important point is to enjoy NaNoWriMo and I’m looking forward to it starting.