I’ve taken part in National Novel Writing Month for so many years now. It’s been a useful exercise and a community I’ve loved taking part in (even co-running for a while).

I have several drafts of novels which were made during NaNoWriMo and I’m even proud of some of them, even if they need work. This year, I’m not taking part.

NaNoWriMo, the organisation, has closed after several troubled years, poor decisions, scandals and so on. It’s such a gloriously simple idea that it persists, even if it’s not got a company behind it. Write 50,000 words in a month, so approximately 1,667 words a day. It’s a good task and one I would often exceed.

After my mum passed away in 2016, I found writing difficult, and losing a number of other family members, a mentor and a beloved pet in the years since created a kind of emotional battering which left NaNoWriMo as the only time I could squeeze out much creativity at all Despite all that, I’ve managed to get comic work during these years and made RPG supplements, in addition to the prose I’d make in NaNo. 

This year I’ve finally been able to go part time to write for a day a week which has been incredibly helpful, although I’m still not as productive as I’d like. I guess I never will be, no matter how much I write.

So does this make for a perfect NaNoWriMo environment? Maybe. I’ve still got the final act of an urban fantasy book and the back half of a book about burnt out superheroes attending conventions to finish at some point. I’m going to use the weird freedom of being without a NaNoWriMo organisation to put a word count into or a community to lead or take part in to focus my attentions.

I won’t be taking part in National Novel Writing Month, but I will be trying to write a couple of pages of comic scripts a day. I have had multiple projects fighting in my mind for control and I’ll try to get first issues of both written to see how they feel.

Red Rails is a pre-WWII vampire story about people fleeing Weimar Germany just as things are falling apart. A vampire ends up in a carriage with a (formerly) wealthy family. He’d been working with artists in Berlin and was fascinated with their son, a musician. There’s going to be some romance, art and bloodshed as things go horrendously awry. It’s a big Child of All Nations meets Interview with the Vampire.

A Forest in the Sky is a dystopian story about an expedition from an environmentally-shattered world into a strange other dimension where nature still exists. I wasn’t entirely sure how to show all of it and listening to QAA talk about tech oligarch doomsday preachers made me break the back half of it finally. This may be 1-2 issues and is very much a space for climate rage to get itself out.
One day I’d like to finish my scripts for Explosion High 3, Amnesiac City (three of eight issues are written) and Past Futuremann Vs The Moon Mummies, but I’ve put them off until things look promising for any of them to come out. I’ve also been noodling on a serial fiction thing, but I’ll go into it if it works for me.