NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month. Also known as the Worst Month In The Entire Year To Challenge One’s Self To Write 50k words.

1. November only has 30 days. Why not just make it February then for a “real” challenge.
2. November is the beginning of the busiest holiday season of the year. Thanksgiving is right there towards the end of the month.
3. Even if, like myself, you don’t celebrate the holidays, other people do. And their actions affect you. I say this looking at all the time off requests I’ve approved around Thanksgiving because I’m not a heartless scrooge.

For me, November would be a death knell for getting any sort of long sustained writing work done. Not only will I be more than likely working tons of overtime during the month, specifically around the holidays but it’s not unusual for me to pull 50 hour work weeks just in general, but my wonderful workplace decided to do their End of Year even in the first week of November.

I know. Right during the midterm elections. Register and vote people.

So, on Monday I’ll be working my shift then flying to Las Vegas, and probably have some time of work mingling event. Tuesday and Wednesday will be meetings and conferences and more meetings and will probably end up being 16 hours of work/mingling before crashing in a hotel room–and that’s assuming I don’t work late into the night to get a handle on the tickets we didn’t have time to process because of all the totally not mandatory Work Events. Thursday, the work still needs to get done but on top of that I’m also flying!

A whole week! Gone!

I’ve always been of the opinion that putting this challenge in November is setting one’s self up for failure. Writing is already hashtag hard, so to put such a challenge in a month with only thirty days, during one of the busiest holiday seasons of the year? Why!

So I will be doing the challenge this year–but not in November.

October, after September, is already the best month. Even in places without seasons it just is because Halloween is fun! The days are just starting to turn but are not so depressingly dark in the mornings and evenings. It has….thirty one days!

I’m calling it National Auxiliary Novel Writing Month: October or NAnoWriMO.

I’m also going to do a fanfic this year because inspiration, what’s that!

But yeah. That’s the plan. I’m ready!