I frequently encourage people to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and occasionally get asked why I don’t participate myself.

Several years ago, I explained it this way: “…because I do more writing than that every month already. Examples: a few years ago I had a month, at work, to produce a 75,000 word installation manual, most of it completely new material. And I didn’t actually have the whole month, because half my work time for the month was allocated for designing covers, disc art, etc, editing all of the other documentation for the product (including the 150,000 word administration guide), updating a document in another project, and doing all the pre-press work on all the docs being written by the entire department for all the products going to press for that month. And I didn’t get most of the information I needed for the main guide until four days before the deadline. I wrote about 45,000 words in four of those days.”

Plus I’ve participated many times in Writers’ Round Robins where we work on old manual typewriters, where erasing and revising is very difficult, and you just have to keep going, keep the story moving until it reaches an end.

I have several times used the month as an excuse to do something I called GeneStoFinMo (Gene’s Story Finishing Month) instead, and was only moderately successful. This year I’m participating in The Alternate NaNoWriMo as proposed by the bloggers at Cafe Aphra. Each writer participating is setting their own goal and going for it.

My goal is to write a minimum of 1000 words every day on my current novel in progress, The Trickster Entanglement, and finish the first draft by the end of the month! I had 35,000 words done before November. If I only do 1000 words a day this month, and actually reach the end in that time, it will be only 2/3 the length of the novel to which it is a sequel. If it is to come in at the same word count as the previous book, I’ll need to write 60,000 words this month, or twice the total if I only meet my daily goal each day.

So I am going to try to exceed my daily goal as often as possible.

As of midnight of November 1, the first day of Alternate NaNoWriMo, I had completed 1305 words. Not a bad start.

Wish me luck!