Well, I’ve made the decision. I’m going to try the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Challenge this year. To succeed in the challenge, you have to write 50,000 words of a novel during the 30 days of November, or approximately 1,667 words per day. You can write extra words or fewer words on any given day, but at the end of the month, your word count must total 50,000 to succeed. (At least, that is the way I understand the rules. There’s an official website, if you want better information.)

The organizers of NaNoWriMo prefer to have the contestants work on a brand new novel. The rules, however, also permit an author to produce 50,000 words of an existing manuscript, as long as all the words are written in November. Any words written before midnight on November 1 do not count toward the total.

That’s good, because John and I are already on Chapter 10 of the sequel to Prophecy’s Malignant Son, and I would rather not lose that momentum by starting something new. As of today, the current word count for the new book is exactly at 41,000. All right, I’ll admit that I did a little word-smithing to get it exactly there, but I really wanted to start with a round number. If all goes well, we might have 91,000 words by December 1 and be nearing completion of the novel. We shall see!

Last November, I did not even consider personally participating in NaNoWriMo. At that time, I was still struggling to produce 500 words a day. This year, however, my life circumstances have changed and my confidence at consistently producing written words has vastly improved. I’ve never tried to write 1700 words of fiction in a single day, but I am ready to make the attempt. John and I have developed a detailed outline for the book, so I know where it is going.

Given all the time I am about to spend on writing, I doubt that I will be able to publish any travel-photo blog posts during November. I will, however, try to produce at least a short post each Friday to let people know how the writing is going.

Anyway, wish me luck! And for any of you who are also doing the NaNoWriMo this year, I wish you all great success!

-Susan 10/29/2021