I’ve done NaNo pretty much every year for the past five or six years. Some years I’ve won, others I’ve spectacularly lost, but every time I’ve done it, I’ve managed to write more than I have in previous months, and it leaves me with a rosy afterglow that at least carries me over into the next calendar year.

I have complicated feelings about my writing habits. I vacillate between feast and famine pretty regularly. Always have. I try to see if I can change things about my life to give my writing more room, but it inevitably boils down to, “Good job! Now that you’ve fixed that thing, here’s anxiety about something entirely different!”

It’s one of the reasons I finally started seeing a therapist. And moved into a bigger place last year. And got a new job.

How much more do I need to change?

But I do love NaNo. It’s a world-wide write-in where the source of motivation is externalized and reimposed. I’m not just letting myself down by not writing, I’m failing in the eyes of a tracking widget on a website.

So I’m going to be doing NaNo again, even though it’s mostly not going to be novel-related. I’ve got a bunch of short stories I’d like to revise and send out since I haven’t really done that much at all this year. And my metric for success is going to be small –

Every story I work on in November I have to send out by the end of the month. It could just be one story. It could be many.

This may work. It may not. But now that I’ve told all you about it, maybe that’ll make it better.

And in an attempt to start posting more on here next year (which will be one of my goals for 2015), I’m gonna be logging my progress here.

The first story up will be my Hitchcock/Dick mashup that I’ve been working on the past few months. I’ve almost got the first draft done after having to rewrite the thing twice so I could get everything set up for the ending that just doesn’t seem to want to come out of my fingers.