It’s the fourth day of November, and I’m already up 6400 words for the month. No, I’m not doing NaNoWriMo. For one thing the organization connected to that once-useful writing challenge has veered from being about writing to being about political connections and that’s not what I want when I’m trying to work (or ever, really). For another, I’m not writing a novel (yet) this month. With 6400 words you could have a decent short story to submit for an anthology. By the end of the month you could have several, to farm out in various places and spread your name around. Or you could have a pair of novellas, at 25K each, which could easily be uploaded to Amazon at $2.99 each, and that might even make you more money than a single short (50K, pulp-length) novel at $4.99. Math is not my strong suite, but that much I can do.

The point is to write, and that’s what I’m doing. I started before November, but didn’t really count the last days of October where I was trying to get the Halloween novella finished and ready for publication. I was very pleased with myself for managing it, though, as I’d set my own deadline for Oct 15 and then blew right past it. Still, I have another Groundskeeper Tale out, I have happy fans buying it, leaving ratings, and that’s what matters to a writer. I then used the momentum of writing I’d built up to leverage my way into November, where I may not be trying to write a full novel, but I have clear goals, wordcounters in my chosen wordprocessing space, and the daily celebration of hitting a goal which then sets me up to do it again the next day. And I’m not counting the nonfiction, like this post or my Substack essays. Hands on keyboard, and writing fiction. I don’t say chair, because it’s not always a chair, and it’s not always my chair, more on that later.

The other thing I’m doing this month, as an early Christmas gift for my sister, is reading a chapter a day of a children’s book for her. Because I’m me, I’m also illustrating it, but I’m not insane so I’m using Midjourney AI to render those illustrations and save myself a ton of time. Right now it’s the classic by George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin. After I complete that book, I was asked for the Just So Stories, by one of my favorite authors, Rudyard Kipling. I’ll see how it goes, if there will be more. Reading aloud, storyboarding, and immersing myself in these stories is bringing me a new appreciation for the style and skill of the authors, which is likely to come out in my writing in some way. You are what you read, after all.

On the art front I’m taking part in Huevember at the gentle prompting of friends and fellow artists on Discord. A color a day, which we are using Midjourney to render, as we all have busy lives (see above!) but it’s always fun to see what we get, and to see what styles we can incorporate to insert a narrative into the disparate illustrations through the month. I’ve been working on a loose creation centering on the exploration of unknown worlds, and the explorers who dared beyond the stars or on other planes of existence. I won’t write a story for this, though. I have enough fiction planned already!

My next publication will be a collection of a dozen science fiction stories. The Twelve Days of Strange, if you will, although none of them are Christmas themed. I’ve got to sort them into a pleasing arrangement, edit where needed (and have my editor go over them again), create a cover, and finish the last story I have planned to include, which is the one I was working on yesterday. I got almost a thousand words on it, after finishing another short earlier in the day, which surprised me. They are very different ‘flavors’ of story, with Long Commute being light and fun, while Expedition is Lovecraftian Science Fiction Horror. Which does beg a question as I’m writing that latter tale. Can you have Lovecraftian and a happy ending in the same story? I’m not sure…

I mentioned ‘not my chair’ and it’s part of how I’m working on writing more productively. I’ve opted to use a wordcounter that is what they call a ‘gamify’ reward-based system. I get a colored bar in the side column next to my manuscript that slowly fills up after I set how many words I want to achieve in a writing session, and shows me once I hit my goal. For me, this works really well, because I’ll think ‘I can do another hundred words, no problem!’ The other thing I’m doing is moving around. Around the house, with my writing laptop, or over to the Blanket Fort where I rent shared office space and can go off to that and have no distractions. I can generally count on an easy thousand words when I go there, versus fighting for a few hundred at home. Some of those being cat words as Toast strolls over the keyboards.

I’ve been out of the game for years, now. Time to be back in it, no matter what the distractions are. I need this for my own peace of mind, not to create a novel. November is about setting up routines, I’ve already done the work of finding what works, now it’s time to apply those tools and tricks to my own brain. The stories are in there, I just need to pull them out.