Getting My Voice Back with NaNoWriMo

This year has been very stressful and strange for me. I'm separated and living in my own place now, but getting here involved a lot of work, tension, and pain, and I just could not write fiction for most of the year.

My NaNoWriMo novel cover.

CC image by J.K. Nilssen, with title added (no other modifications).

I had a few promising fiction ideas, but nearly every time I thought about writing, an awful feeling of emptiness would stop me from doing it. Then I saw friends of mine excitedly getting ready for NaNoWriMo, and I thought that maybe the speed of writing required, and the friendly competition, could get me to set aside my perfectionism and self-editing and really allow myself to write a ROUGH draft, an approximation of the story. Anything that I could work with later, because writing something is much better than writing nothing. So I'm doing it! I started late, on the third day of the month, and I'm up to 6,300 words so far. That's short of the target for today, but not by much, and I still have time for at least a couple more writing sprints today. I'm rewarding myself with bragging and chocolate every time I finish a sprint!

In the meantime, the Kickstarter for my next anthology is almost at its end, but not fully funded yet, so if you'd like to be a helper, please check it out and tell your friends about it! Not Our Kind: Tales of (Not) Belonging. 

My New Anthology: the Kickstarter!

THIS IS HAPPENING:

Oh, didn't I mention? I have a new book in progress. NOT OUR KIND: Tales of (Not) Belonging. "A genre-defying diverse collection of fantasy and sci-fi stories of cultures, their problems, and seeing life from a new point of view."

"Edited by Nayad Monroe - who also edited What Fates Impose - these nineteen stories bring us tales of being the other, of belonging, and not belonging. Our contributors have won a wide range of awards for their previous work, and include: Wes Alexander, Alex Bledsoe, Maurice Broaddus, Jennifer Brozek, Amanda C. Davis, Sarah Hans, Janet Harriett, Tyler Hayes, Michael Haynes, Erika Holt, Gary Kloster, Marissa Lingen, Remy Nakamura, Andrew Romine, Ekaterina Sedia, Lucy A. Snyder, Reinhardt Suarez, Juliette Wade, Tim Waggoner, Damien Angelica Walters ...and perhaps YOU." (We're hoping to reach the goal of an open submission call to add more stories!)

In order to pay the authors a professional rate, we have this fundraising campaign going. The book is currently 59% funded, with six more days to get to 100%. If you'd like to help get this book made, please head over to the Kickstarter page, and/or tell all of your friends about it! Because there's some great new fiction and rewards to get out of this!