NaNoWriMo, 2011 begins today.

 For those who may be asking what this all is, here’s a link to explain it all:  http://nanowrimo.org/en/about/whatisnano

National Novel Writing Month starts today and ends Nov.30th with a goal of a 50k word novel by the end. You can follow my word count updates over at http://nanowrimo.org/en/participants/acdntlpoet

I’ve updated my profile over on NaNoWriMo.org in the hopes that taking baby steps now will give me enough motivation to really dig in and give this another go. I DID participate back in 2007, and even pulled out a ‘win’ by producing over 50k words in under a month, but what I produced wasn’t even worth trying to edit in order to salvage anything….

I’m hopeful that this time around, even if I don’t ‘win’, that I’ll at least produce something a bit more workable. At the very least, I’ll consider this month a win if it gets me writing again. This year I think I am going to take a dramatically different approach and not focus on an overarching novella plot, rather take a decidedly “Joyce-ean” approach ala “Dubliners” and work on vignettes, or simply short stories to string together with a larger concept later on.

I found, after 2007’s attempt, that I don’t do well with larger fiction works. That single lesson is what will be driving this year’s attempt. Not to say it will be non-fiction, but rather I will only be working with short pieces and will see how, or even if, they can be strung together into a novella of sorts during the editing period in December and beyond. For now, however, the focus is JUST on producing the words not ensuring the quality.

Are you participating too? If so, add me as a buddy on the site so we can keep each other honest and motivated 🙂 Of course, I’ll also likely be blogging here about it too, as I learned I tend to blog more when I am busy writing already. Sometimes writing for different purposes helps drive the creativity even more.