With November upon us and so many writers’ blogs heralding perticipation, I feel compelled to doscuss the reasons this blog will not be boasting a NaNoWriMo banner.   I have nothing against National Novel Writing Month.  If I did, I wouldn’t have linked to it above.  I might participate some time in the future, but not this year.

First and foremost, I can’t write that much in a month.  Not at this point in my life, no.  It doesn’t fit the pace of my creation.  It took me a year to write my first novel, which needs to be rewritten from the basement up before it’s remotely serviceable.  Yes, a year for 113,000 or so words.  I thought it was great then.  For years I thought it was great.  I’m still too attached to it to really redo it.  It was the very first thing I ever wrote and it started my path to where I am today.  The memory of my dedication to that novel reminds me that I cannot do NNWM.  I gave up too many things while I wrote that novel…and there wasn’t all that much going on for me at the time.  I’m already behind with mundane classroom work (grading, making out tests, calling parents, etc.), I want to spend more time with my daughter, and I’m far enough behind in household chores that I’d rather just move.  How can I rationalize that big a jump in my word production when it would leave all these things behind?

Second, novels aren’t where I’m at.  I still plan to invade either San Diego or Seattle this summer for six weeks.  Thus, I need to keep woring on short stories for my Clarion and Clarion West applications.  I sure don’t want to be “that guy” who was wait-listed one year and didn’t make it the next.  I have stories to sub, but not a whole lot written since my last application.  Worse, my Naked Man story will likely be too long to submit for either application.  I guess I need to get through it and on to another one.

Third, I don’t really feel like NNWM offers enough incentive to participate.  Oooh, I get to claim I made my target word count (short of true novel length, even for YA).  What else?  I’ve never been much of a word counter anyway.  Some of my most productive days churn out only a few hundred words, but the quality of the words or where the words bring me are infinitely more valuable.  I could type like Jack in The Shining and get 50,000 words. So I may participate some day to be a joiner and create a production goal for myself, currently even the intrinsic rewards aren’t driving me.

So no, I will not be NaNoWriMo-ing in November.  Good luck to those that are.

-Oso