I don’t think I’ll spin up my NaNoWhineMo bot this year. It was a bit of fun but I have no desire to resurrect it. I tried my first NaNo back in 2004 when I was just starting out on this writing diversion and I cannot remember what I wrote. I think I “won” but I have no idea what it was. According to my NaNoWriMo profile I joined the site in October of 2004 but I must have used my old email, because my Gmail account started in 2004 and I don’t have any emails about NaNo until 2005. I participated but again I have no idea what I did. In fact the earliest project I currently have on the site is 2011’s Poetry House, which I’m pretty sure was a re-write attempt. I have notes that I tried it again in 2013 and 2017 outside of NaNoWriMo, and at this point you should guess that I’m doing Poetry House again for my 2022 effort.
I have outlines for two other novels with this character, ideas for a few more, and a group of short stories, one of which was published by Pulp Corner and also pushed to Amazon but I can’t seem to find it anymore, so I don’t know if it was pulled or not. The last time I tried to load Pulp Corner’s website I got lots of security certificate errors. I don’t think they’re around anymore, sadly.
I have often told writers not to write the same novel over and over again, so I have to ask myself why I’m writing this one for the 4th or 5th time, and this is the first story for this character. Well, there’s an earlier story I could tell but I expected that if I ever wrote it it would be just as a prequel story. I have tried a few other novels and I don’t want the novels to be done out of order. I recently read through my inventory and found 30,000 words of an unfinished story near the end of the character’s known career and I really wanted to finish it. I remembered the ending but now how I got him from the end of the manuscript to the end of the novel.
I’m facing the same problem with Poetry House. I have the first half of the thing plotted, and I know the end, it’s the damn back half that driving my crazy. So I’m trying it again, just because I want to try to figure out that frustrating muddle after the middle. I’m trying not to worry about it, but let NaNoWriMo do what it does best — encourage me to write and generate wordcount. If I get frustrated I’ll probably break out the prompts I’ve been building from the Story Engine and try to finish a short story. My writing group would probably appreciate it.