It’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and all I’ve been seeing from friends is how this year they are going to crush it. Me? Well, I decided to do a different route.

I’ve been bad about updating the website over the past…. nine years. Yeah, this started off as a weird blog before I was even a published author, but as my writing career has grown the site had morphed from a blog to a hybridized website. Plus, getting my name dot com has driven up the search engine pings. Yay.

But anyways, I decided that I will post one blog update a day for the entire month. I have no idea if I’m interesting enough to maintain readers who might be wandering through the wild wilderness of the internets, but I’m going to do my best to be entertaining. Not all posts will be thought-provoking or even “well written”, but that’s the nature of writing. Not everything you write will be gold, and not every idea turns into a novel.

John Ringo once mentioned in a conversation that he has something like 400,000 words worth of abandoned novels sitting on his laptop. That’s… insane, when you consider that I have a total count of only 261,000 words written this year (I really slowed down over the summer… I had zero words written in June and July, for example). But when asked why he didn’t finish any of them, he just sort of said that not everything can be completed for one reason or the other (paraphrasing here, since I was mildly drunk when he said this and I have a bad memory).

This is going somewhere, I promise.

One of the things I noticed new writers do (and old writers as well) is they will become so caught up in the editing process while they write that they will stagnate in the writing process itself. Tweaking and editing pauses the creative process, and oftentimes the writer will be so frustrated they give up on the project. I’m not saying this is what happened for John (I know for a fact it didn’t because ///insert big explosions here/// will live forever in infamy), but it has happened to other authors I know.

So keep writing, NaNoWriMo’ers. December and January are your months to edit.