Hey guys!

Well, we're approaching the middle of November. Baseball's over (and congratulations to the Nationals on their first ever World Series championship), the NBA is in full swing (and my hometown Knicks are frustratingly bad), and we are 13 days into National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it's more frequently called.

Like I mentioned last month, I'm pausing all my other writing endeavors to try and churn out 50,000 new words of an existing work in progress by the end of the month. It's not going well.

Of course, there are reasons why--some of them personal, some having to do with work drama--but the overwhelming truth is that I'm likely going to fail this speed-writing challenge. You know what? That's fine. As someone smarter than me frequently tells me, these words are more than I had on November 1, and that's the point, really.

This challenge also got me back into a project after life events kept me away from it for two years, and as I work out the plot, I see the holes in it from the first time around. That gives me starting points for the first round of editing when it's all said and done, and that's also a fantastic takeaway.

This is my fourth attempt at NaNo, and while I've never completed one, I've always left with either the partially fleshed out skeleton of a solid project, or confirmation that a story won't work. To me, that's as valuable as having a complete first draft. I also get to identify deficiencies in my writing process, which is helpful in the future if I'm serious about pursuing this as a career. So this is me, learning something.

Urban Legend is coming along nicely, and when it's finished (probably not on December 1), it'll be a project I enjoy cleaning up and fixing. Until then, it's time to push on.

Any of my writer friends out there having the same problems or lessons? Or is anyone looking to share the success of being on pace, or even completing their NaNo project? Feel free to leave a comment!

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