Building up to this years NaNoWriMo has felt a little different to other years. Partly because I want to win again this year, last year got a little derailed by real world stuff. It’s also because I’ve decided to do NaNo differently this year. I was going to work on a military science fiction story I’ve got in mind. It would have been my third attempt at getting it off the ground but I’ve realised I’m not ready to write it yet. Aside from the fact I’ll need to do some extensive outlining I haven’t decided how I want to tell this story. There’s also the case that I don’t feel like I’ve got the experience and skill set to write it yet. I’d like to get a couple longer, completed stories under my belt before I tackle it.

Then I decided to rewrite my vampire story from a few years ago. This is a collection of ten stories that are all tied together, serialised I guess but they’re all in the first person perspective and for what I want to do with book two I need to change format. Now at one stage I was going to just rewrite it as a novel but then I thought I’d just write all the episodes in the third person point of view. That wasn’t sitting right with me though, some of these stories work really well as told from first person. So I spoke to my Beta readers and decided to do a massive edit, and keep some stories that are told from that first person point of view while I’ll adjust others so they’re told from the third person. I think this will work really well for this collection and give me a lot more freedom for future works in this universe.

With having changed my mind twice now, and not really having anything that I can get to 50k ready to go I’ve decided to work on short stories and novellas. If I try to run with an idea for a longer piece from one of my ideas I know it’s just going to crash and burn and I’ll spend the next five years faffing about with it to try and get it close to how I want it (PE3 is a prime example of this). This way I can be a lot more flexible. If I get stuck with one, I can move onto another one. If a story really isn’t working at all I can do the same. On the other side of that, if something catches fire I can just run with it and see where it takes me. It also works if I come across a submission call that takes my fancy as well (last year I wrote a story for Burdizzo Books second annual 12 Days of Christmas 2017 anthology during NaNo).

I’m hoping this way will help when I hit the mid-NaNo slump, and if life gets in the way it won’t be as difficult to keep putting words out because I won’t be having to think too much about bigger arcs and so forth.

There’s not long to go now, and I’ve got PE3 to be getting done before then. So I’m going to almost have a mini-NaNo before we kick off on the 1sr of November.

I hope all you other NaNoers out there are getting as excited as I am, and your preparation (however you do it) is going well.