I have set everything else aside, because November is for writing.

I tend to wake too early, but today I slept more than seven hours after an early night, and was ready to write before six. I was so anxious to begin. Two thousand and some words each day will get me to my goal. Every day for the thirty days of November.

Most of this blog post was already written yesterday. The cover design revised twelve times too.

National Novel Writing Month [NaNo] is held in November. The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days. I’ve done it before. I completed 76k in 2016, 75k in 2017, 70k in 2018 (it was Daughters still called Butterfly Fontanelle), began revising an older novel with 50k in 2019, Then, in April of 2021, I went back to the drafts from 2018 to complete the parts of Daughters I’d been afraid to start, cut 20k, added 30k, printed the entire manuscript out and reordered the chapters, and revised it all beginning to end. That effort began two and a half years ago. It’s hard to believe how long I’ve worked on it.

This year, I am playing another sort of “rebel” and completing a collection of short stories instead of a novel. I have a great many stories, enough for a book and a half. I am working on the half that are a bit odd, a bit magical, or set in some imagined future. Some of them are old, some brand new, and some not even a glint in my imagination. I want fifteen short stories or seventeen or twelve shorts with a novella. You will see I am cheating about the novel in “Novel Writing Month”, but not so much as it might appear at first. NaNo allows for such cheating. I aim for at least 65,000 words. Most of those words are not written.

The stories I am sure about concern a woman winning at solitaire and messing up everyone’s luck in the bargain, a convention of “Minor Magicals” that shakes up a city, the warning crows of Cherry Street, seductive scars, wrong numbers asking for advice, and the last of the honey. There might even be a horror story set in space, which is not usually my style at all. I would like a story about a mean old woman who sometimes does good in the style of Baba Yaga. And hovering just out of sight, I feel there is a story that wants telling, but I have no idea what it’s about.

For the first day, something easy: begin revising my published story about children who dream themselves as owls. Try not to wreck it. [That last bit is the challenge.]

DAY ONE WORD COUNT: 2171