NaNoWriMo 2022 is Nearly Here. What The Hell?
For those of you who don’t know, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a world-wide writing challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. Thirty days for 50,000 words, which is just over 1,666 words per day. If you hit 50K, you win. If you don’t, you don’t.
Who determines if you win? Well…. you do. It’s self-reporting. Can you cheat? Absolutely! Does that make you a horrible person? Eh, I dunno. It’s fairly low stakes. You do you, I guess.
What do you get if you win? Bragging rights, really. And you can buy a T-shirt. And they give you a nifty little PDF certificate that says you won. Again, low stakes.
Some people take it VERY seriously, with outline and ideas months ahead of time. Other people shrug and do what they can, not caring one way to the other.
There’s swag. There’s groups and communities. You get to challenge yourself, if that’s something you’re into (I’m not one to judge).
My first time doing NaNoWriMo was way back in 2012. I had a two-year-old and a newborn and I was totally kidding myself about my capabilities. I did not finish that year.
Next year, 2013, I was seven months pregnant. We were getting ready to sell our house in preparation for moving from California to Washington. My middle kid, barely a year old, got sick with a stomach thing that lasted for over a week. I know it will come as a surprise, but I didn’t finish that year either.
But I did finish in 2014. And I have finished, or WON!, every year since except for 2019. I was still decompressing after leaving a toxic job situation and had just started a new position. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it and I didn’t even try. But still, I have seven NaNo Winner t-shirts in my closet. I’m gonna have them made into a quilt someday.
It’s always an interesting experience for me. I generally try and push myself out of my comfort zone, to write something outside of my typical genres or in a different style or point-of-view than I usually use. It can lead to some interesting places. In 2016, after the election, the villagers in my story unexpectedly led an uprising against their tyrannical leader. <shrug> Shit gets wild sometimes.
But now here we are in 2022. NaNo starts a week from today. And I have planned…. Nothing. Honestly, I’ve got nothing. My book, The Other Side of Winter, is still with my editor. I had planned to work on that revision for NaNo, but I don’t think it’ll be back in enough time and, really, that’s not something I want to try and sprint through. Chess, not checkers, and all that.
My writing brain has been foggy lately. I have all the ideas. All the Brain Dragons™. I just don’t have the words. And it sucks. I think, in order to get unstuck, I just need to push through it and NaNo might be the perfect time for that.
At this point, it’s either going to be:
A weird time-bendy thing about early 20th-century paranormal enthusiasts trying to solve the mystery of an abandoned house.
or
A Donner Party-esque tale of overland migration in the 1840s in which our plucky heroine is also chasing after her family’s murderer.
Who knows. I guess I’ll figure it out in a week or so. That’s part of the fun of National Novel Writing Month for me.
(image is the official NaNoWriMo 2022 graphic)