Aaahhh!
This year has been going by SO fast. One minute it’s summer and — BAM — we’re already in the middle of fall.
Cool air, colorful leaves, pumpkin spice lattes, and chats with friends about Halloween plans galore.
But you know what else comes with autumn for the writing community? That’s right. NaNoWriMo!
Or at least, so I thought.
The Current State of NaNoWriMo
It’s been a good while since I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo. Four years to be exact. I didn’t say it in my blog post, but after my first NaNo, I experienced a severe burnout.
Almost didn’t write for a year!
But because writing is my outlet, it was something I was bound to come back to regardless of bad experiences. I won an award for my research essay in 2023 and managed to do my first-ever writing fellowship in 2024!
On top of that, I’ve learned a lot from my first NaNo and even thought of ways I could improve upon it and make it my own.
So this year, I’ve decided to give the challenge another shot. I mustered up the courage to revisit the website and update my account.
Only to find this:
NaNoWriMo is gone?! The one thing many writers look forward to participating in each year has ceased to exist?!
Impossible.
Of course, I had to do some digging, and it didn’t take long to find out what happened.
Apparently, the organization had shut down since APRIL after drowning in numerous controversies. (Which goes to show that I am not as terminally online as I once thought).
Then, on top of that, NaNo also struggled with maintaining revenue, according to Kilby Blades, the interim director.
Groggy from my research around NaNo’s demise, I came to the conclusion that this may have been the best decision for the organization.
The sad thing is, I can’t really mourn NaNo due to my being so removed from the community itself. I know it meant a lot to writers, though, especially since writing can be a solitary hobby, and NaNo was one of the few platforms that offered community.
I remembered scrolling through the forums mid-pandemic, reading recruitments for Discord channels and email lists. Writers would exchange feedback, share their word count progress or even collectively procrastinate on those very forums.
NaNo really was a digital bazaar for writers.
A trading post of ideas and good deals.
(It was NaNo that actually got me a pretty sweet discount on Scrivener!)
What next?
So, in the spirit of NaNo, I’m doing my own little challenge for a novel I really need to finish.
I decided to call this year’s challenge, “My Novel Writing Project”. Or MyNoWriPro, for short.
(Not very creative, I know. But doesn’t it just roll off the tongue? 😆)
My WIP
Since the pandemic, I’ve been chipping away at this fantasy novel brewing in my mind and dispersed across numerous notebooks.
When I started, I was sure it would be YA — a ragtag group of teens on an adventure to save the world!
Now? It’s adult.
And what I thought would be a trilogy is now leaning more into a quadrilogy.
I have so many plans for this series. And it seems the longer I work on it, the more the world expands. (I even started drafting a short story for one of the characters).
After bombing my first NaNo, I grew fatigued of typing. So I vomited out the remainder of my (very) rough draft onto a composition notebook.
It wasn’t pretty. But it was something. It at least gave my story some direction.
So I let that sit for a while. Revisited it. And now I’m in the process of typing it out.
The problem is, I want to change a lot. So much of what I wrote isn’t going into the typed draft of my novel. The world has changed and its characters have changed too.
My main character was supposed to be four years into her marriage at the beginning of the novel. The plot was supposed to follow an unconventional couple. But now, I’m focusing on her as just a single, twenty-something-year-old figuring out herself in the world.
I’m not beating the self-insert allegations with this one. And I’m perfectly fine with that.
The Challenge
Back to the main point!
How is this challenge going to work? Well, I’ve made two rules for myself:
- I MUST complete the novel
- I have from October 1st to December 31st
That’s it.
“Ok. But what about the word count?” one may ask.
While I’m not completely against having word counts. For this particular project, I opted not to have a hard word count.
I know fantasy novels tend to fall anywhere between 80,000 and 120,000 words. But don’t want to hold myself to a specific word count because in the drafting stage, it’s bound to take away from the story itself.
It’s the main reason why I’m not a fan of NaNo. It holds word count over substance.
The point of this challenge is to get the characters’ stories out first. Then we can decide where to add or remove if need be. I believe this approach will greatly curb the potential to burn out as I did during my first NaNo.
Writing just for the sake of reaching a word count, I realized, is not fun.
That being said. I’ll still use the 80,000-120,000 range as my north star while I write.
Anywho, I’m looking forward to starting my “NaNo” a bit earlier this year. I’ll try to post monthly status updates to keep myself motivated.