Nanowrimo is not for everyone, and generally, its more for newer writers than me, although I do know many other pro writers who nano.  For any who don’t know, Nanowrimo is all about writing 50,000 words in a month, which the size of a smallish novel (My novels are usually 120,000 words). At any rate, for the curious, here is a bit on the book I’ve started, and a bit on this year’s nano experience.

This is the first time I’ve combined my MFA and Nano.  I’ll get to do that again next year.  This semester I’ve been working on poetry, and I was curious about how that would affect my fiction.  I think it did make me a little more lyrical in my prose.  Since the book now has to get tucked away for MFA work through mid-January and then I’m likely to have copyedits for SPEAR OF LIGHT (the sequel to EDGE OF DARK), I won’t see much of this manuscript again for about 10 weeks.  So I’ll be able to tell then.

The book is a fun coming of age story (but appropriate for adult readers) that explores a nearer-term and on-earth future.  So it’s different than my last few books and actually is working my futurist muscles harder than the far-far-future stuff.  But that’s a different post.

Nano is always about deadlines. I’m very busy (full-time plus day job that’s been personally really hard this year for some reason), MFA, we just moved, and I’m keeping up a slightly-slowed writing career. I’m doing less short work, but I feel like the novels need to keep coming. The universe is weird. Part of why I signed up for Nano was because I felt like I was stagnant in my writing sales, and now I’m getting some momentum I don’t want to lose.  I guess sleep is not an option.  That’s all to say even doing nano felt impossible going into it, and I finished only one day early this year. But at any rate, since I’m even busier than normal this year, there wasn’t any time to think too hard or get stuck so I didn’t. I  basically typed as fast as I could.  It was really almost fun, like the reward for all of the other hard work. What glory to have half an hour to two hours a day when I could actually just write forward on fiction!

Anyway, it was fun.  And I’ve got a number of reading recommendations and an essay that’s stuck in my head backed up — I’ll try to get those out in the next week or so, but no promises (see above).