NaNoWriMo is a subject I’ve brought up often over the years. For those who don’t know, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and is an annual exercise to write 50,000 words in the month of November. I’ve participated many times but have only succeeded once. However, even those years I failed resulted in a lot of extra writing.

This year, I’ve decided to do my own version of it, with a few changes. Instead of November, I picked October. It has one extra day and no major holiday during it (though I would argue Halloween should be a national holiday celebrated for a week). Also, instead of working on a new book during this time, I’m going to use this opportunity to finally, finally finish AfterLife.

As of this writing, I have far less than 50k words left, even if I include rewriting some chapters that desperately need it. Once I finish AfterLife, I believe I’ll have enough time and word count left to put the finishing touches on the third Unseen Things book. It’s been mostly complete for quite awhile now, and if I push myself, I believe it’s not unreasonable to finish both of these books so I can finally move onto new material.

To keep myself honest and make it more interesting, I challenged my mom, author Mickee Madden, to participate with me. She has a new novel she’s been looking forward to working on so we figured this would be an opportune time to support and challenge one another. We plan to send each other our progress nightly and I’ll keep it updated here.

One potential bane or boon is that I’m scheduled for surgery later today. It was rather unexpected and came about after I made this agreement with my mom. It could work to my advantage since I’ll be home for a few weeks recovering. However, I don’t know how easy it’ll be for me to sit at a computer for any length of time. I had the same idea after my surgery last year and found it uncomfortable. This year, I’m going to have to figure a system out. I’m determined to let nothing stop me.

Thanks for reading,

S.L. Madden