NaNoWriMo 2k22: Weekly Update #4

Hey babes,

In case you missed it November is National Novel Writing Month—which participants typically abbreviate to ‘NaNoWriMo.’ You can get the skinny on it here. If you want to make a tax deductible donation to the organization, you can do that here. If you want to support me as I write a new novel, you can upgrade to a paid subscription and/or buy a copy of my very first novel here. And of course, should you wanna read that first novel, Everything Fails: A Science Fictional Memoir—which I wrote during NaNoWriMo in 2013—you can do so for free on Ello by starting here and following the navigation at the bottom of each page.

So, as you may well know or perhaps are learning for the first time today, the basic goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a ‘novel’ of 50,000 words or more in 30 days or less. If you’ve been following along, you’ll recall that I added a few extra guidelines for myself this year. I’ve been evaluating them weekly, which I will do here one last time, as well as provide an overall assessment of how I think each played out.

Those added guidelines are:

No checking word count.

Did not check, not once. I did tally them all up today, the last day, so I could enter them into the graph on the website and see if I ‘won’ by reaching 50k words. For the sticklers in the house, those word counts are assigned to a day based (mostly) upon publication—with a few exceptions. And for the 29th, I totaled up all the outtakes and stuff in the holding pen that I wrote at some point over the month but it would be too tedious to try and determine what I wrote when to the day. I did write every day, averaging around the NaNoWriMo par (which is about 1700 words a day).

Minimal planning and preparation.

As I’ve said, I started the book with the basic idea of the ‘backbone’ structure and that has slowly refined into a sort of primer-style narrative of how to read the book specifically, and my work in general. It also serves as a table of contents, includes a map or sorts, and will (eventually) be a kind of index, too.

Each day, I knew approximately what was going to happen next, but made no efforts to plot or plan things out—which is probably evident, but anyway; that was the plan, and I stuck to it.

Revise as I go.

I did not really stick to this. It helped me a lot on TVS & The Black Book Of Fear; however, I recalled that I had already written an experimental draft of that first, then rewrote it for NaNoWriMo in 2015. So this was a completely new draft, and I found it quite hard to do this month.

What I did do was reread and proof each chapter before publishing to Substack. Made very few changes. So you can decide if that counts or not.

Stop while I still know what’s coming next.

Mostly. I never felt like I’d completely tapped out the well and that was the main goal here. That can be a very hard feeling to come back from, especially in, say, week 2. So I’m feeling good about this one.

Do not plan more than a page or two ahead (optional).

There were a couple times I might have, sort of. But mostly I stuck to this. Again, as is probably obvious upon reading.

No writing meetups.

Didn’t go to one. Didn’t even want to. Easy peasey.

No skipping days.

It was damn close a coupla days, but I wrote on the novel every day.

No voluntary travel.

We had a few family minicrises, but still managed to not have to travel or do anything too time intensive. Lucky.

I will donate to NaNoWriMo.

Did that straight away. You can, too, right here. Toss ‘em a fiver.

Use tarot and other cards as needed.

I left this open as an option, but I ended up not needing this or wanting this. I may work in the few chapters that I sketched out using one pull, but. Maybe not.

Monthly summary

Overall, I’d say I did very well physically and mentally. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Writing a novel in a month is an emotional marathon, and you really have to pace yourself and take good care or you will quit or lose it. I did very well taking care of myself, and I did lose the story. It is nowhere near finished. If we use the current time and word count as a projection, I’d say I’ll finish in February and it will be about 150k words. We’ll see. I’m not worrying about word count at all anymore—not that I did really in November because I did it blind—but that’s a reasonable guess.

So that’s it for this the final week of National Novel Writing Month 2022. As I said, I am still writing the novel herself, even though the event is ended, so if you want to cheer me on or tell me what you think of the book, please do. [Ed. Specifically, I’m look for feedback for what it is like to read it, like the experience of reading it, more than reactions to the story or contents themselves; I’m after the reading process.]

If you’ve made it this far, and you’re like, T, what the hell are you talking about, what book? It’s called Teresa’s Backbone, and I’m publishing it here on Substack. [Ed. There may be physical zines at some point; no one expressed interest, so it was an easy drop during the event.] You can read it here. Listings are in reverse order cos that’s how Substack works, and they’ve been too busy dicking around with trying to emulate Twitter than fixing features that users actually care about, so I made a directory (as I mentioned before) called ‘The Backbone’ that has the chapters listed in order—insomuch as their is an order cos as you will see, this book has a self-navigating element to it. Anyway, that’s pinned to the top of the tab for the novel—which was labeled ‘NaNoWriMo 2022’ but is now called ‘Teresa’s Backbone’ cos, you know, the event is over and that’s the name of the book.

What’s coming next?

So at the beginning of November, I said the usual operations of the channel/zine/newsletter/stack/wtf would pause during November and resume in December. That was presuming I would finish the draft in a month, which I did not. So I will carry on sharing the Teresa’s Backbone chapters in web post only so as not to destroy your inbox, and will pick back up with “You Can Never Go Back …” this weekend. Talkie newsletters will continue, but won’t be limited to the novel. Gaucho was to return in January 2023, but now will probably be more like March 2023. Sorry Gaucho fans! It’ll be good, though, cos I’ll be coming off a long tear of Secrets craziness and that is the best headspace from which to write the relatively straightforward and simple tale of William and Pem.

Okay, that’s this week. If you would like to support my writing, please upgrade to a paid subscription. If you cannot, then please do not. But if you can and you want to, please do!

Xoxo,

T

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