NaNoWriMo

Anyone planning to participate?! For those who don't know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, which is November. It's an annual one month challenge for everyone to attempt to write a 50k word novel (or get 50k words into a novel that they can continue to write after the challenge is over). It's a great group of people that organize "write-ins," create challenges for each other, and they have a website where you can keep track of your goals. It's a fun thing to be involved in, allows you to explore your talents and creativity, and everyone encourages each other to reach their goals. If you plan to participate, I highly recommend using Scrivener for writing.

I've been trying for the past few years but never hit 50k words. In fact, for the past few years I've worked on the same novel but I'm only about 20k words into it. Although, I've done a lot of planning, research, outlining, etc. and wrote excerpts from various parts of the story that aren't in order. That one was really fun to work on because it required a lot of world building and I was able to create an entire fictional religion, complete with deities, rituals, traditions, holidays, different sects of the religion, a full mythology behind it, sacred texts, etc. As you can tell from my blog, that kind of stuff is very up my alley!

This year I decided to work on a different new idea for a novel and take a break from my old one. I got excited about it early and already wrote about 10k words before November even started so I'm already 20% of the way to the 50k word goal on the first of the month.

I have a lot of studying to do this month too unfortunately so I hope I have enough time to continue with my novel. I have an important exam coming up a few days after Thanksgiving so hopefully I can succeed at both studying and writing for NaNoWriMo. Everything always seems to come up at the same time, doesn't it? Maybe it's just me, but it seems like I always have a hundred things going on at once or nothing at all and I'm bored out of my mind.

I'm going to try to carve out the time in my schedule for NaNoWriMo. I'm using the excuse that it's a mental and emotional health thing. It's self-care. I look forward to it all year and if I don't participate at all because I'm too busy studying, I'm just going to be left feeling bummed out, burned out, and upset. Let me know if you plan on participating too!

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