I’ve have participated in NaNoWriMo for the last several years. Indeed, I have “won” in the sense that for the last two years, I’ve written at least 50,000 words in 30 days. This year, however, I won’t be participating in the traditional way. I am not a novelist. I understand that is where the money is if you want to make a living as a writer, but I don’t make my living as a writer, and the truth is, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I don’t want to write novels. I love short fiction. I not only want to write more short fiction, I want to get better and better at it. I want to be a great short fiction writer. That is where my focus should be.
To that end, while I won’t be doing the traditional NaNoWriMo this year, I will be using the month of November and the NaNoWriMo motivation to produce some short fiction. I haven’t yet decided how I will approach this. Will I spend the month producing one long story? Will I try to write a story a week for 4 weeks? It’s not clear yet and I need to think on it some more.
That said, for those who are planning on doing NaNoWriMo and are looking for some advice on how to pull off 50,000 words in 30 days, well, I’ll probably have a post or two on how I managed to do it the last couple of years.
And because I think that NaNoWriMo is a good cause and a good experience for writers to go through, I will once again be donating some money to them.
For those interested in my past experiences, here are all my posts for NaNoWriMo 2010.
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