Tuesday, November 22, 2011

My Reasons for Avoiding NaNoWriMo

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Welcome back to the Sisterhood of the Traveling Blog.
Laura chose our question for this month:
If you do NaNoWriMo, why do you do it? If not, why not?

No NaNoWriMo for me this month.  I have Etsy on my mind.  And family.  And Thanksgiving.  And lots and lots of excuses.

I freely admit that most of my reasons for avoiding NaNo are excuses.  It’s hard work!  But among my best reasons are: When I attempt NaNo,

I rush through my story.  Lots of telling, but very little showing.

I still manage to be tooooooooooooooooo wordy.  Out of 50k last year, I suspect 20k needs to go.

By the time I finished my 50k, I was so exhausted I could barely function.  And worse, I was tired of my story.

By the end of my 50k, I adored my tersely spoken, non-human characters, but I didn’t much like my humans.  I still liked my basic concept, but many of the carefully crafted details had stopped making sense.

And a year later, I still haven’t gotten back to clean up or finish that manuscript.  I can’t decide if I simply can’t cope, or if I’ve moved on.

So for now, I’ve decided not to worry about it.  I’ll get back to that story eventually.  For now I’ll work on the other things that have caught my fancy.

Speaking of new toys, I recently joined Google+, but I really don’t know what to do with it.  Are you on Google+?  What’s the best way to network when social media is a foreign language?