oh look it's schroedinger's november
Tue 2014-11-04 22:47:23 (in context)
- 5,300 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 51,730 words (if poetry, lines) long
The savvy reader will have noticed that it's November now. November: The month officially designated National Novel Writing Month. The month when Niki Writes a Novel.
But this year, for the first time in ten years, I'm not in charge. I'm not planning write-ins or parties, I'm not sending mass emails, I'm not the municipal liaison.
Do I sound really, really happy about that? That's because I am. Instead of putting together an all-night write-in to host on Halloween night, I got to spend all that day in a sports bar watching Day 1 of the 2014 WFTDA Championships, and all that night sleeping. Instead of hosting write-ins for the kick-off weekend, I was helping to host an out-of-town guest, playing Puzzle Pirates, and attending roller derby practices. NaNoWriMo was going on somewhere in Boulder, and it wasn't my responsibility. After a decade of things being otherwise, that's intensely liberating.
Which prompts the next question: Am I going to participate at all?
Theoretically, yes. I've spent some time this year trying to revise the structural outline of Iron Wheels, so this would be a good time for me to start re-drafting the novel.
But practically... I'm not sure. I barely got any writing done today at all, and tomorrow will be taken up from start to finish with ongoing efforts to repaint the bathroom and refurbish the living room closet doors. And I have other writing tasks of higher priority, like the requested rewrite of "Caroline's Wake" and the latest Friday Fictionette (still haven't recorded an audio for October, by the way). There isn't enough time in the day to do everything.
And yet, emotionally, it would be a shame to break a twelve-year streak of participating in, and winning, the annual 50K-in-30-days challenge.
So. The answer is "I'm not sure. Let's find out, shall we?" And so we shall.