No NaNoWriMo for now

Topics/tags: Writing, short

It’s November. That means that it’s National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Every November, I consider whether or not I can find the time to participate. It’s not that I particularly want to write a novel. It’s not that I think the world needs me to write a novel [1]. It’s that writing fiction might be an opportunity to stretch myself a bit.

Of course, given my workload, every November, the answer to whether I can spare the time is Nope; I’m too busy. That’s certainly the case this year, as any spare writing energy I have needs to be devoted to the textbook.

I will note that, although the form of novel writing will be a challenge, the quantity does not seem to be. To write a 50,000 word draft of a novel in a month would require that I write about 1,700 words each day. Most of my musings are about 1,000 words, and I regularly write musings that are 2,000 or more words, so I could write a novel instead of musing. Or I could write a novel in the form of a series of musings. Or something like that.

Maybe I’ll try next year. But then I say that every year. I seem to recall that one year I saw something about a National Tech Book Writing Month, but I can’t track that down. What the world probably needs is an International Educational Resource Writing Month. I’ll leave that to another year, too.

This November, I’m planning to make progress on the textbook (an OER) and the musings (which you might think of as an epistolary novel about a curmudgeonly old computer scientist). That seems like more than enough for now.

[1] I have heard that there are writers out there who oppose NaNoWriMo on the grounds that it creates much too much writing that no one needs to read.

Version 1.0 of 2018-11-01.