NaNoWriMo is coming!

NaNoWriMo is coming!

For anyone not aware, November is NaNoWriMo for many authors (National Novel Writing Month). It is a month filled with a ton writing as we all try to complete a 50,000 word rough draft of a novel. And it is so much fun!

This wonderful autumn month we are currently enjoying (I love this time of year! Anyone else a sweater-weather kind of person??) is lovingly dubbed "preptober" for all of us participating in NaNoWriMo. October is the month where we prep our novel for November. And that is exactly what I have been doing.

For a long time, I had no idea what I was going to do for NaNoWriMo this year. I was stumped. The last two years I wrote Return to Sherwood and its sequel, but that story has come to a close. So what would I write next? That was the unanswerable question.

I have many story ideas and partial manuscripts (just one or two chapters), so I went skimming through them to decide which one I wanted to craft into a real novel. It took a great deal of searching, but I finally found one that I wanted to write.

I'm genuinely giddy about writing it, to be honest.

I am going to be dipping my toes into a brand new genre this time around. My Robin Hood series is Historical Fiction (if only loosely based on historical events), Return to Sherwood and its sequel is Historical, and the Finding Hope trilogy is Dystopian. This time around, I'm going to be writing Crime Fiction!

I'm a little bit terrified. I read lots of mysteries and suspense/thriller novels and absolutely love them. But writing them? Even genre has its own rules and styles, and Crime Fiction is a foreign language in many ways. So yes, there's a lot of fear involved. Fear that I won't be good enough to match this genre. Fear that I just don't have what it takes to write Crime Fiction.

But there's also a great deal of joy. I love the story idea, and I have been having more fun than I can easily describe prepping my novel for November. I have my outline, my character profiles, my period research (because yes, it is rather historical in its own way. I can't help it. History is where my heart lies).

I'm eager for November to arrive so that I can actually start writing this novel.


Are any of you participating in NaNoWriMo? If so, what sort of projects are you working on?



Happy Writing, Everybody!