We’re six days into National Novel Writing Month, and even though I am a little bit behind my word count goal at the moment, November has me feeling very literary!

NaNoWriMo has been interesting so far; as I wrote last month, I am working with a very loose outline in a sort of middle ground attempt at tackling the 50,000 word goal. The process of writing this month has been quite similar to my typical process: massive writing spurts punctuated by long periods of inactivity. So far the greatest issue has been resisting the urge to write things other than my NaNo story, a desire that’s been heightened by the other reason why I’m feeling so literary this month: I’m being published twice in one week.

This publishing spurt is due to the long lapse in time between having some of my works accepted and then actually published. One of my poems is in an anthology that will be released this Thursday, but my work was accepted this past winter. Likewise, my first published fiction piece came out in Flash Fiction Magazine yesterday; you can read it here if you’d like. That piece was accepted for publication in August, so this acceptance-to-publication time was pretty quick!

These publications are exciting for me, of course. But they also give me the urge to write more short-form pieces to submit to magazines, rather than finishing a sloppy novel draft. I’m not even fully committed to doing anything with my NaNo novel; I just want to finish it for the sake of finishing it.

I just haven’t decided yet if that is a good enough reason to do NaNo. Needless to say, I’m not sure if I will be doing the competition this year. However, I really do want to reach 50,000 words in a single story this month. If I do that and still think it’s not worth it, then I’ll be able to justify my lack of interest next year as not being, say, fear or laziness.

That said, I’ll end this post here. I need to get back to novel writing!

• Current drink: UFO Hefeweizen
• Current book: In the Woods by Tana French
• Current audio book: None (my car is still broken down!)
• Current music: Cowboy Bebop [Tributes Mix]