In the 17 years that I have participated in National Novel Writing Month, I have always stuck to the 50000 word goal, even though none of my manuscripts have ever been finished at that count. This year, I want to finish a manuscript draft, which means going after 90000 words total. That is never going to happen in one month, so I’m giving myself until December 31st to do it. My actual goal for November is 54000, which I’ve done before and think I can do again. The real challenge will be doing another 36000 in December. I have done 30000+ words in a month before, but never on the heels of NaNoWriMo. Also, my Decembers tend to be busier than my Novembers, adding even more to the difficulty level of this endeavor. But I want to see if I can do it, so I’m going to go after that daunting number 90000 and see what happens!

Preptober is upon us! It is time to prepare for the marathon of writing: National Novel Writing Month! Next month, so many writers around the world will be attempting to write 50,000 words in 30 days!

This is my favorite time of year. I love NaNoWriMo season. It’s been a part of my life for a very long time, and it has become a yearly tradition that I just can’t do without. I look forward to October every year, when I begin to plan out the story I’ll be working on in November.

My local ML (municipal liaison, the one tasked with wrangling the Wrimos of their given region) shared an Instagram challenge from author Rachel Bateman, who created it for her local region. I decided to take on the challenge too. I’ve been posting responses to the prompts on my Instagram, but I thought it might be nice to do it here too, since I’ve been neglecting this site since I went on vacation at the beginning of October.

Day #1 is All About You.

This will be my 17th NaNoWriMo. My first time was in 2003, when I was in college and one of my friends heard about it from one of our teachers and convinced a bunch of us to do it. I wrote 17,000 words, but it was the most I’d ever written on a story, and I was hooked. It's been a fall tradition ever since. I have written in a variety of genres, and I’ve even been a rebel a couple of times, but now I stick to mysteries, historical and contemporary. I also always start a new project, because I’ve found I’m more successful that way. This year, I'll be working on book 4 in an alternate history mystery series set in Japan in 1908.

When I’m not distracted by NaNoWriMo, I'm a stay-at-home mom who balances writing with homeschooling. I live in Texas, but my heart is in Japan, where I lived for three years and met and married my husband. We would love to live there again someday. I have one living daughter and one daughter who was born sleeping. I am going to self-publish my first book next summer, which is both exciting and terrifying and what this website is all about. Life is rarely dull, and I'm always curious what tomorrow will bring.