Blog update – Nanowrimo

My blog is going on a sort-of vacation for the month of November. I’ll still have comic related posts every Wednesday, but it will most likely be limited to a first impressions post and a single review. I’ll try to divide these reviews so that there’s one X-Men comic, one other Marvel, one DC and one smaller company/independent review but I’ll only do a full review on a comic if I have enough to talk about. There also won’t be any extra posts related to comics.

The reason why isn’t because I need a break, although it’s probably best to have one every now and then anyway. The reason is that I’m participating in Nanowrimo (National November Writing Month). It’s this month-long event organized online where a bunch of people from around the world try to write a novel within one month. I did it for the first time last year and enjoyed it very much. I met some other writers through the local meet-ups and write-ins, and I’ll actually be helping out a bit this year. While I won’t be writing my book on Wednesdays, that’s because it’s my dedicated day off of writing for the month and I’d rather spend it enjoying fiction than spending much of the day writing about it.

To officially win Nanowrimo, you have to write at least 50,000 words within a month. That shouldn’t be too hard for me … I managed that in 9 days last year and finished off with just over 151,000. So instead of simply trying to make a measly 50,000, I have three goals this year. 1: I aim to write at least 10,000 words on day 1 – I will start writing at exactly midnight on November 1^st. 2: I aim to write at least 50,000 by the end of the first week. 3: I aim to finish two rough drafts by the end of the month, just like last year. Both of these drafts will likely be longer than both of my novels from last year (one is fairly ambitious), so I wouldn’t be surprised if I pass 170,000 words by the time they’re done.

For this blog, I’ll also try to write at least one Nano related post each week, temporarily transforming this into a Nanowrimo blog. I’ll share some of the things I learned or the kinds of people I’ll meet. I might share a bit more about the series I’m working on and hope to get published someday and maybe share a little bit about my city if I discover something I didn’t know before that’s worth sharing. But my main goal for the month is to write fiction like a machine.

The first book I’m writing is one I’ve been looking forward to tackling since March. It not only adds zombies to the mix of my vampire/werewolf series, but the main villain is interesting enough that I ended up writing a 5-part short story miniseries about his origin story this past month. The other one I’ve been planning for more than a year and I’m excited about that one too. For the most part this year, my writing has consisted of 2^nd drafts, short stories and improving the first book I hope to get published. I’m so pumped to write something new again that I’m starting to physically itch with anticipation.

So for those of you who only read this blog for comics, you’ll have less content for a month, and maybe the first week of December if I need that time to mentally recover. For those who enjoy updates on writing or are writers yourself, I hope you enjoy this little side-project, and good luck with your own writing whether you’re participating in Nanowrimo or not.