November

Today is Halloween, and while I would love to spend tonight out trick or treating, going around and getting candy and having a good night out on the streets with my friends in ridiculous costumes, there are a number of things keeping me from doing that. Most of all being that at 4 AM, I have to be at work starting an eight hour shift, and I'd frankly prefer to be awake for that.

I considered writing something to go with the season today, but frankly, I don't think I'm going to top Sacrifice when it comes to that, so if you really want to read something from me that will give you the spooks, it's only a few days back.

Instead I'm going to talk about tomorrow.

Tomorrow is an equally scary and exciting day for me. I'm fairly certain that I've written about it before, but November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short (with NaNo shortening that even more). As you might be able to guess, I'm a huge fan of NaNo and all that it stands for. With a goal of writing a fifty thousand word novel in thirty days, meaning that you have to write 1667 words a day.

Words a day? Man, where have I heard that before.

I've participated in NaNo a number of times, but in recent years have had trouble finishing. That was one of many reasons that I wanted to start this blog, and at least a part of why I decided to have a words per day goal. I was familiar with the concept and comfortable with it, knowing how to weave my way in and out of it, and decided to go with a lower goal, knowing how much time I spent on the goal of NaNo, and about how much time a third of that would take.

But with it coming back up, I find myself with an interesting problem. I already have a set writing goal per day. It will quadruple come tomorrow by following this goal. But this is something that I know I both want and need to do. I've been spending the past year working on writing. But what I haven't been practicing is writing a book, and that's the thing that I really want to do.

I've considered stepping away from the blog while I write this book, seeing as I will more than be meeting my goal on a daily basis by writing this novel. But when I started this I said that I wanted to write here, on the blog, every single day. And sure, I've missed two or three days along the way, but that's a hell of a lot different from thirty. Besides, part of it was exploring different ideas everyday, which is hard and focusing on a single story for thirty days might be a relief from pushing every day for new content, but that was a challenge I accepted from the beginning.

I also considered writing shorter blog posts every day, in which case I would still be writing and exploring, but when I'm already writing a little over one and a half thousand words a day, what's another five hundred?

So I think I've decided to just keep going. To push myself every day more than I have all year. And I think that'll be for the best for me. Hopefully over the next month things won't fall off in either quality or quantity, but if they do, at least now you'll know why.