In a daring move, unprecedented in the history of my own being, I committed. I said to myself, “yes, why not, let’s actually bash out some words or a few hundred or maybe a few thousand for this thing called Novel November.”

Then, in a moment of sadness, I remembered. I remembered that National Novel Writing Month–affectionately known by the mealy-mouthed shorthand NaNoWriMo–got cancelled.¹ What was an excitable budding novelist to do?

I think I kind of forgot about it for a time. I may have even lamented a little about a missed opportunity or something. And then in September I remembered and started looking for some alternative. You see, I had two story ideas percolating in my brain for the better part of the year. I even hand-wrote the start of a draft for one in a trusty Field Notes pocket book. Then I took that draft and started pecking at the keyboard into Obsidian. I also made a rough outline for my second story. And then I just started writing here and there, at the laundromat, on the grocery line, balancing myself on the subway. If I could have these bursting writing moments, what could something like NaNoWriMo do for me?

Quite a bit actually but the momentum was very very short lived. Am I embarrassed about my paltry progress? Hell No. I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I wrote. So much so that what I thought was going to be a very short story is not longer a very short story. (And I’m learning about the length characteristics so who knows what all this falls under.)

I did the Novel Writing challenge by ProWritingAid. They opened up the platform for November. It was fun tracking the number of words I wrote but I didn’t use the tool beyond that. It was crazy to see my daily word count goal get automatically updated the more I missed the goals and got further away from 50,000 words. Hah!

Here are some fun screencaps from NovNov (weird, but less mealy-mouthed shorthand).

And now that it’s December, I’m left feeling something, like, what the f—- do I do now?

“Keep writing, duh,” you’re thinking at me.

Yes. You’re right. Duh.