Last year was the first year that I properly participated in National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. This is a time honored tradition among writers. As you might have guessed, writers attempt to write 50,000 words of a new fiction project.

Now if you kept up with my personal writing, I have never written 50,000 works of fiction in a month. (I did hit 20k in August, though!)

However, I was successful, but only because I rebelled against the traditional rules. I combined my fiction writing with my work writing, and I blew past the 50,000 word goal. I still write for a living, so I know that I still will not be able to write 50,000 words of fiction in a month. There simply just isn’t enough time in the day for me. With that in mind, I am rebelling again, but I will still have a finished product at the end of the month if all goes well.

I finished my first draft of the second Learning Curves novella in August and have not touched it since. I love the story and I love what I’ve put into it so far. However, it needs a full rewrite because I wrote it in first person would need to be in third person. It’s super sweet and super Christmasy and I think that you will all love it once it’s done. I think it’ll be around 20,000 words once I’m done, which means I will be adding about 8000 new words to my draft. Like many others, I’m really looking forward to working on this over the next few weeks while I write about various things for money on the Internet.

The plan is to have its in my editor’s hands by December 1 and to have it up on Amazon by December 15. This means that I have a lot of work to do.

If you want to keep up with my progress, I will be doing a hashtag game on Twitter – check my profile for #lgbtqwrimo tweets and talk to me about them! You may need to check in on me and make sure that I’m not losing my mind any more than usual, but I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun with a great product at the end of the month.

I’m not really worried about the word count issue. In order to hit 50K in a month, you need to write 1667 words a day. That’s a very low word count for me on my work words, not even counting my fiction words. It’ll be interesting to see how many words I actually write in November for NaNoWriMo.

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo?

Talk to me about your project in the comments and feel free to hit me up for sprints on twitter. I’m pretty much always writing from about 10 AM EST to 6 PM EST.  Sometimes (often) I’m working earlier or later depending on my workload.