May I Write a Novel?

As I said a few weeks ago, I've begun to find my way forward in the next book. 

As a rule, I'm not much of a joiner, but there are times when I make exception. I've occasionally done National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November, but the only year I ever hit my goal was 2023, when I was working on The Son in Shadow. It helped that I'd already started, and that I was trapped in airports / on planes for a significant part of that time. 

NaNo is no more, for reasons, and anyway, November was never a good time for this project. I was always impressed with how many people managed to write 50k words in that month. (I never went that hard - 30k was generally the goal.)

I belong to a Facebook group called Successful Indie Author, run by Craig Martelle, who used to organize the 20Books conferences. He has set up something he's calling May I Write a Novel?, which lasts, obviously, for the month of may. I decided to sign up, along with at least 125 other people, and with my usual 1,000 words per day goal. 

Craig keeps us organized with a spreadsheet where we can post our daily word count, and it calculates the percentage of our goal that we've completed. I'm ahead of myself so far, but that's not surprising. I like to start strong so that if I have a few slow days, I'm covered. At this point, I'm shocked that simply signing up and "writing" with a few other people has motivated me this much!

Obviously, the book won't be finished this month. I'm doing something new and different and working from an outline, which is jarring for a discovery writer, but it seems to want it. We'll see how it goes.

Did you ever try NaNo? Did you win or did life?