The word ‘NaNoWriMo’ has not been spoken aloud in the house this year. There’s just too much other stuff that we both need to get done, that we’re already way behind on. Just the thought of adding a writing challenge on top of it all is deflating. There was a time when I looked forward to November, and I’ve “won” NaNoWriMo every year since 2001, which puts me in rarefied territory.

But it just hasn’t been as satisfying lately. I go in hoping to regain the writing-every-day mojo, and while I do get a lot of words typed, come December nothing is different.

Still, not even trying is even worse, right? It’s surrender.

Then there’s The Fantasy Novel I’ll Likely Never Write. I’m approaching the episode I’ve been working up to, the one that shows our hero’s Big Flaw, and beyond that I don’t have many ideas. Previous serial fiction published here has been an exercise in off-the-cuff writing, and while that’s fun, the lack of any plan whatsoever shows in the final product. Never mind the low level of polish that write-skim-publish provides, I look back on some of those episodes and see big opportunities lost. If I’m going to continue TFNILNW, I want to do it in a way that’s more enjoyable to read. It will be easier to make sure every word advances the story when I know what the story is.

So this November I think I’ll try to spew out some ideas of where that story might go, and see if I discover a plot. Whatever comes of that, it will NOT be the story you read here. It won’t even be a real rough draft, more a set of sketches to see if I can find something worth writing about.

I will try to do at least a little bit each day. I won’t worry too much about word count. I might write the same scene thirty times; I might drift off on a tangent to see if anything interesting crops up. I might write 5000 words of backstory on one of the characters, just to dig into what makes them tick. Whatever I come up with won’t be readable as a story, that’s for sure. If I get 50,000 words, that will be fine. If I don’t, my streak will be over and I can relax.

If I get a plot, that will make the month a success. I’d even settle for a theme. If I find neither then that will probably be it for TFNIWLNW. But I’m going to own November this year, not be its slave.