Winter is coming, and right before it, November.

Every year I compete in National Novel Writing Month during the month of November. I have been doing this for over a decade and look forward to the month of mad writing more than is probbaly healthy, well at least healthy for my writing.
With all of that said, I am strongly thinking about not doling NaNoWriMo this year. Bear with the explanation - I have developed a process where in during the month of Spetember I come up wiht an idea, then spend the month of October researching and preparing spreadsheets, etc so that I can dive right in at 12:01 a.m. on November 1st. But, it's just turning into August today and I have the idea (no process needed to narrow it down) and I have been working on the background ideas, and I think the only research will be making sure that I am not accidentally lifting plots from other stories. I don;t want to sit on this until November, but I also don't think if I were to start today that I could make myself write as much as I do then, nor will I be ready to do this again in November. Okay, even to me, that sounds like kind of a lame cop-out.
I'm a writer and I do write all the time - but not just on novels. I have totally convinced myself that writing blogs and forum posts counts for my daily word count (or whatever), but really? Maybe if I were hilarious or making the big bucks then I could count that kind of writing.

Well then, we can't have me feeling lame for months and months. And if I don't do NaNoWriMo this year, I think pretty much the only excuse that would even come close to counting is, "I started in August and I'm still working on it." The whole purpose of a month of writing dangerously is to make writing a habit. After you have done the competition long enough to have more than a decade behind you, and more importantly to have developed a system for getting new novels going, you don't really need NaNo except for the word count deadlines, and since I just participate online, can't I just have an email service send me a daily reminder that I should be writing?

This post did not go where I thought it was going. I thought I would be writing a little post explaining that over the nexxt couple of months I would be reporting on my NaNo preparation, not one expalining that I can't do NaNo because I need to write now. I guess, instead I will just say that I will try and write about my progress and any techniques I come up with to keep myself motivated and on track.

This feels so liberating. I am actually quite excited about this project. So. Do you wanna know what I'm writing about? Well stay tuned. I will tease today by saying that this is my first foray in Urban Fantasy, or at least how I interpret the drama.