If you’ve been following this site for a while, you know I’m an avid participant in National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo.  This year I feel particularly driven to take part because I’ve written so little over the past few months.  I think it will be a great motivational tool to help me get back to writing on a schedule.

For those of you not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it’s an annual event that encourages participants to write 50,000 words in thirty days.  That’s basically a short novel.  Yet the word count isn’t the real goal of NaNoWriMo.  The real goal is simply to get people to write.  Sure, most of what is written during that month will be unpublishable, but that’s not the purpose of the event.  NaNoWriMo encourages people, whether they have ever written a novel or not, simply to do it.  In past years, I’ve used it as a way to “up my game,” so for the month of November I more than double my writing output. I’ve managed to complete my target each of the past six years, so I consider myself a bit of a NaNoWriMo veteran.

This year my goal is to write the second novella in my tentatively titled “Calypso Tryptych.”  I wrote the first novella in January (it clocked in at about 45,000 words), and I’m working on revisions.  This trilogy of stories will be my initial foray into self-publishing, with hopefully several more novella trilogies to follow.  As a newbie to self-publishing, I don’t have high expectations, but I figure I have nothing to lose by giving it a try.  At best it could make me some money; at worst, it’ll be a good learning experience.