t’s time for me to admit defeat. I’m not going to “win” NaNoWriMo this year. And I’m not going to get this novella done before the end of the month. There are several reasons why, the least of which are schedule and other time commitments. The real issue is that the novella is not going…

his year, while I am participating in NaNoWriMo, I am not writing a novel. After all, I am not a novelist, but a short fiction writer. So I decided to make a slightly altered definition of NaNoWriMo the “No” part representing “novella” instead of “novel.” A novella, for those who don’t know, is the longest…

f you’ve been following along, you know that in the first several days of NaNoWriMo, I managed 13,000 words and was very pleased with my progress. Then things seemed to grind to a halt. I could claim several reasons for this: I sat down to work on my story one night and instead ended up writing…

almost didn’t write again tonight. I spent my evening doing laundry and packing and a variety of other things before I head off on a very quick trip to the Bay area tomorrow. By the time the kids were in bed and asleep I’d all but given up on writing for the evening. After all,…

n the sixth day, I rested. I was just too tired to write last night. I probably could have put some words down on the page, but they would have been there for word count only and would not have added substance. So I took the night off. It’s okay. I was more than 3,000…

t’s back to the work-week, which means I am back to doing my writing in the evenings after the kids have gone to bed. Tonight I wrote for about 2 hours, and while a lot of what I wrote felt like info-dump, I am beginning to recognize the structure of the story and see all…

oday was another good day, but much more spread out than the three previous days. By that I mean that I started writing this morning, and didn’t finish until just now, but I wasn’t really writing continuously for the last 5 hours or so. I did it in small chunks. This was in part because…

think I can count on one hand the number of days that I’ve written more than 4,000 words of new fiction in a single day. But that is exactly what I did today. I wrote nearly 2,000 words in my morning writing session, then, this afternoon while the Little Man napped, I wrote another 2,500…

had to get in my writing early today because Kelly and I are going out tonight. The whole family managed to sleep in until past 8am this morning, which may be a first. But Kelly decided to take the kids out to Gymboree at 9am and when they all left, I sat down to get…

oday’s writing session was much better than yesterday’s, not in terms of quantity, but definitely in terms of pace and quality. In 90 minute, I managed to add nearly 1,800 words, 300 short of yesterday’s mark, but still above pace. Better still, I worked steadily and deliberately and I think the result is a scene…

ne of the biggest challenges that writers face as part of NaNoWriMo is the urge to rewrite. After that first day of writing, you sit back and wonder: did I choose the right story? Am I telling it from the proper point of view? I think I did way too much info-dumping. The scene is crap–I…

y first writing session for NaNoWriMo 2012 is complete. In just under 2 hours, I wrote the first one-and-a-half scenes of my novella, and managed to get in a total of 2,152 words, nearly 500 words over my target. Remember that I’m doing something slightly different than the norm. I’m writing a 25,000 word novella,…