NaNoWriMo

Well, here it is again, National Novel Writer’s Month.  For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is kind of how I got my start as an indie author.  Five years ago, I decided I was going to “officially” participate.  I registered on their website, I did daily word counts, all to try and see if I could actually do it.  The results of that effort led me to start Hero Unit as a series.

Since then I’ve never participated to quite that level, for various reasons, both good and bad.  I think perhaps if I’d dedicated myself better, I would be farther along on some of my works in progress.  Small regrets aside, I’ll never forget what it was like to dedicate so much of my time to writing.  It rarely happens anymore with being a stay at home dad. 

This year I made the decision to participate once again.  Now because I don’t work on Sundays for religious reasons, and my wife’s birthday is this month, that leaves me 25 days.  The math is pretty simple, 50k words divided by 25 days.  I was a few hundred shy on my first day, but that shouldn’t be a problem, I know my word count will fluctuate.  The real goal is at least 2k a day.

One of the things I’m realizing is that I need deadlines, but I’m terrible at setting/keeping them for myself.  For this month the work-around for that will be posting my daily word counts on Instagram so my followers are my check system.  It might sound lame to some people, but in my mind, it works. 

That’s kind of the long and short of things for me right now.  I’m trying very hard to not get stressed at the fact that ever since we moved, I’ve hardly had time to dedicate to writing.  This is my chance to sort of makeup for lost time.  Hero Unit 3 is my target project, so if everything goes well it could be published within the next six months.  A longer gap than I would like, but my life hasn’t exactly been stable over the last few years.

Wish me luck