#NaNoWriMoNoNoNo

It’s that time of year again. The month when many writers do their damndest (is that a word?) to slam out fifty thousand words in just thirty days.

I’m not even going to try. Not that I wouldn’t if I could spare the time, but I can’t. Fifty thousand words in thirty days means averaging almost two thousand words a day. That’s perfectly doable – but only if I took a month off the day job. Trying to pull a nine-hour day (that’s my average, Monday to Friday) then follow up with several hours’ writing (for that’s how long it would likely take me to get a couple of thousand words out) would kill me in less than a week, probably.

And there’s the prep work I’d have to do ahead of time. I can’t just spout out a story, you see. I must have a plan. (If you’ve seen my book Finish Your Book you’ll know something of the planning I do before the first words are committed to paper or pixels.) And given that it usually takes me around three months to go from first ideas to a completed scene-by-scene timeline, I’d have to start prepping around the beginning of August to be ready to start the actual writing on November 1. And that would cut into work on other projects, and I can’t afford for that to happen. Those other projects are just too important to put to one side.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that you, dear reader (and writer) shouldn’t have a go. I’d never try to stop a writer from writing, ever.

But I won’t be doing it. Not this year, at least.