According to Wikipedia:
NaNoWriMo is an annual internet-based creative writing project which challenges participants to write 50,000 words of a new novel between November 1 and 30.

A number of people I know have done this in previous years my friend Dan Lynch even wrote a song about it:

(I may have once mercilessly reworded/hacked about this song to reference a different “nano”!)

I considered doing it this year – it’d be an interesting challenge and I’ve had a few bursts of enthusiasm about writing a book in the past, that have quickly gone elsewhere when I looked at what was involved.

The fictional styles I like – Cory Doctrow’s Little Brother voice – hyper realistic dystopian sci-fi, I don’t really feel I need or want to try to copy, and the Gerald Durrell My Family And Other Animals-style autobiography of gentle humorous anecdotes, also doesn’t really need a poor imitation.

Many many part-finished draft posts (with working titles)

I don’t “live” fictional worlds inside my head or imagine stories, and so I’ve no real desire or motivation to write anything fictional, and there are very few non-fictional things that I feel deserve 50,000 words of attention.

Right now, there’s no subject I wish to consider writing about in that detail, so this time, I’m going to let everyone else steam on with their novels, whilst I do something else. I think NanoWriMo is probably most helpful to people who are intimidated by the idea, or have a book almost ready to go, or think about things they’d like to write about in depth all the time, but never seem to sit down and get on with it.

Now there are things that I do always seem to have in my head, but never sit down and write, but they’re not novels, they’re blog posts. I currently have over 60 part-finished blog posts, ranging from just a working title with a link to an article I want to write about, to completely written posts that are waiting on another post (providing context) to be finished before they can be published.

Back in February, I challenged myself to write a blog post a day for the whole of February. The result wasn’t flawless, but largely successful.

With 60 unfinished blog posts in varying stages of completion, it should not be difficult, I’m going to attempt to clear the number of half written posts by at least half over the next 30 days.

The posts that linger in my drafts are generally the ones requiring the most thought, the most reflection, the most sanity checking – if I get 30 posts out during November, I’ll be really pleased.

Let’s see how it goes!