Continuations

(I think the title relates to this post, but I mostly liked how it follows my first post.)

This past November, I made a serious NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, if anyone hasn’t heard of it before) attempt for the first time, another first from past year which I forgot to mention in my Beginnings post. I can’t say I followed all the rules of NaNo; I worked on a book I had already started instead of starting something new–but I never liked that rule anyway. I am happy to say that I was successful, and passed the 50,000 word mark in November. But one thing about NaNoWriMo as an idea has always bugged me, as someone who writes long books: 50,000 words is nowhere near a full novel for me (nor for many people writing fantasy and science fiction). And for me and many others, the danger of starting something and never finishing it is always present.

Which is why I decided to take it upon myself to make January, which I have off (and therefore fewer excuses not to write a lot) into a follow-up of NaNo. I’ve played with various cute NaNoWriMo inspired names, such as MyNoWriMo (My Novel Writing Month), JaNoWriMo (January Novel Writing Month), and the most boring of all, NaNoWriMo 2, but nothing seemed to fit well, as it’s not just my novel writing month, and the January one feels weird. But I think many people would agree with me that the following up of our NaNoWriMo work, be it continuing the novel or simply editing what we’ve written, is almost as important as the actual sprint to 50,000 words itself.

I don’t have high hopes of this catching on as an organized thing, as my internet influence is extremely minimal, but I’d like to get my idea out there. I’m committing, for this year and for all future years, to, in January, attempt to match my word total from NaNoWriMo. I think the matching is better than, say, another set total, since it makes this month into a true follow-up. And for people who didn’t make the goal in November, there is less pressure to reach the goal, which may relax people and let them write more than they thought they could. (And of course everyone on vacation can’t cite school work as an excuse.)

I think I’ll stop here, since I feel like I’m rambling a bit, but at least the idea is out there. We’ll see if this catches on in any way, but either way you can follow my attempt to reach 50,797 words (yes I more or less stopped in November after hitting 50k–school made me do it!) on my twitter, @yakovmerkin (there might already be a link there on this site, so if there is sorry for the redundancy–I’m still very new to this whole website thing).

And if it’s something you’d like to participate in as well despite it already being the 4th, feel free to let me know either here or there!

Happy writing!