I don’t have a clever idea this year. In fact, this was going to be my final official participation year, had the organization made it to November (which it didn’t). This marks my 12th NaNoWriMo, in 13 years. (I took 2021 off.)
I have a strange goal this year: a million words. Not, however, a million words in one year, but a million words in 12 Novembers, so effectively a full year of NaNoWriMo challenges yielding a grand total of 1,000,000 words.
Why? Because a good friend I met in 2014 did that in his 12th year. (His last year was, well, last year, 2024, and he had done an impressive 19 challenges in 20 years. He also skipped one year.) I was far enough along, and doing well enough, that I did the math, and it was achievable. It’s not that much worse than the base challenge (average 83k words per year for 12 years, vs. 50k for the regular challenge).
The other thing he did last year was a personal, retrospective year. He didn’t share too many details, but I liked the idea. He found an excuse to have a character visit the worlds of his previous NaNoWriMo projects.
And that’s what I’m doing this time. I have a character (which predates my participation), which I will send careening through all the things I’ve written during NaNo. I might even wrap it up, Heinlein’s Number of the Beast style, with a big party where all the characters crash into each other.
And, because I’ve done so well the last several Novembers, I only need about 56k words to hit that million, too. (I’m at a cumulative 944k.)
I’m tracking it on writingmonth.org, and posting the daily word counts on my Mastodon account. And given how fast I usually hit a base amount of 2k, usually no more than 3 word sprints, often two good ones, I’ll probably be done w/the writing by lunchtime.
Maybe I can surf the energy into some other projects? Here’s hoping.
Happy November (almost!), happy writing!
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