NaNoWriMo 2023

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The whole premise is that you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. The point of the practice is to get you churning out words. Sit your ass down and write.

To hit the goal, you generally aren’t editing or revising much, and probably any drafting or structuring is pretty minimal. The goal is to get the words out, not necessarily create a finished draft. Though of course a complete draft would be lovely.

I have had an account on the NaNoWriMo website since 2011. I created “drafts” on the site several times, and always wrote something but didn’t always update my word count.

No, I have never “finished” by getting all the way to 50k. Mostly I just don’t dedicate enough time to actually sit and write, or I wrote too slowly even when I did make time (the first few years I wrote a lot of the story long-hand, which is no longer practical).

This year, I bought myself a Freewrite Traveler (that is not currently an affiliate link, but I might try to make it one in the future), which is an over-priced under-capable word processing device. The whole shtick is that it does absolutely nothing other than write. No web browser. No social media. Not even a spellcheck. Navigation within a document is painful and editing is tedious – but it synchronises to the cloud. It uses an e-ink display which is very low-res and high-latency. This means that I don’t see the typos until three words later and I usually don’t go back. Once I do start editing, it’s gonna be ugly.

At the beginning of the month, when I decided to buy myself the gadget and decided to try to do NaNoWriMo, I set a personal goal of writing every day, regardless of word count (the official NaNoWriMo pace is 1,667 words/day). Today is the 27th and I’ve written every single day so far for a total of 23,553 words. I’m sorry to say that the editing and upload software skipped counting on one of the days, when I wrote on the device but was not connected to WiFi and thus couldn’t sync with the cloud. The data was backed up when I next connected, but the official streak-counter was broken. I’m bummed about the counter but proud of my streak nonetheless.

I am well out of practice with Word Press and need to learn the new versions of the tools… including figuring out if there is a word counter… and then I’ll have to decide if I can add these stats to my goal…

This year’s project is tentatively titled “The Darkshire Wood” for ease, but I hate how melodramatic and moody the title feels. The name comes from me (my last name really is Wood) and the tool I’m using to make myself write – the games of Oliver Darkshire, who I back on Patreon. His games are one-page silly RPGs, and they are fun story-generation tools that get my creativity flowing without me having to plot out a whole damned novel.

Have you ever done NaNoWriMo? Tell me about it!