Today is the first day of the 2023 NaNoWriMo “season” and I’m planning to use it to my full advantage.
I guess I should first explain what the heck NaNoWriMo is, eh? First of all, it stands for National Novel Writing Month and it’s always the 30 days of November. It’s a global grassroots effort to help writers do what we do, which is write. It started 25 years ago (happy anniversary!) as a month for novel writers to get a book written in 30 days. The goal, or way to “win” the event is to write 50,000 words in the 30-day period.
Anyone who follows this blog (or even just looks at it, LOL) can see that I’ve become terrible at writing for myself. I get so caught up in life and writing for other people that I’ve not been taking the time to write out my own thoughts and reflections. Today seems like a good day to get back in the groove a little bit!
Since its inception, NaNoWriMo has evolved to include any kind of writing or editing project and you don’t have to do the 50,000 words. Those who want to write fewer words can set a smaller goal.
This is my third or fourth time trying to do NaNoWriMo and I don’t think I’ve ever done anywhere near the 50,000 words. This year is a little different in that I’m a volunteer ML, which stands for Municipal Liaison. I work with the returning ML to manage the NWA region for the duration of this event and the two camps that are throughout the year. We host writing sessions, offer encouragement, and try to foster community. Our returning ML was struggling to do it by herself, so I volunteered to help take off some of the load. It’s been fun so far just doing the prep work and I look forward to, hopefully, getting more of my own writing done.
I plan on splitting the month into different parts. Well, not so much the month but the workload. I’m still slugging along on my book project and that will be my main focus. To both get some other work done and to “cleanse my mental palette” so to speak, I will do what I’m doing right now, which is to work on personal blogs. Personal can mean a lot of different things; I just mean “Jamie blogs,” be it for my business or this space.