It's WriMo Time!

If you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, it probably sounds like something weird involving rhinos, so lemme splain. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, an event held every year where writers commit to completing a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I’ve participated six times and it’s a crazy ride full of angst and excitement and freakouts and crappy writing and incandescent moments of the pure joy of noveling.

It's also my magic feather. Outside of NaNoWriMo, I’ve yet to finish a novel. (There was a completed novella in eighth grade, but we do not speak of it. It is an ancient creature we spiders fear above all others.)

This is a problem since I’m trying to finish a novel now, and it’s really really hard to motivate myself without the camaraderie provided by legions of other writers doing the same thing at the same time.

Luckily, there are other events similar to NaNo that run throughout the year. One that I’ve known about for a while is JulyNoWriMo. It has the same rules as NaNo except that writers can work on existing projects instead of having to start new ones.

This is perfect for me, because I’ve been waffling about my current manuscript for months now. I like the story, but, like a kid on a sugar-high or a crow with shiny objects, I am both obsessive and distractible, and I’ve had a lot of distractions to obsess over lately. So while I’ve been pouring my creativity into a purely self-indulgent story that will definitely never be published (fondly called Not My Novel or my Not-Novel) and spending hours exploring the Avengers tag on tumblr (do not get me started on my newfound love of Marvel. This is for your safety), my steadfast little novel has waited patiently with a hang-dog expression for me to come back and give it the love it deserves. 

If I continue as I am, floundering around and generally being as gung-ho and proactive as Sleeping Beauty, then this novel will end up as sadly abandoned as my last, I’ll lose the chance to work on a really fun idea, and it’s possible that my best friend Sarah Allen will pester me to death.  

So NO MORE, I say. I refuse to surrender to the complexities of the icky middles! I will overcome my inability to write subplot! I will conquer this sucker or I will die trying.

So yes, I’ve joined JulyNoWriMo, and I’ll be writing 50,000 words this month, and holy carp-yes-the-fish am I terrified, but it is going to be AWESOME, and if you find me weeping quietly in a corner, you now understand why.