To nanowrimo or not to nanowrimo?

 So, if you've been following this blog for the past couple of years, you'd know that I frequently participated in a funny "little" exercise called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). To make a long story short, the exercise is to write a story of 50 000 words in a month - specifically the month of November.

I last participated (and floundered spectacularly) in 2021 when burnout hit me so hard I would have been seeing stars if I wasn't so exhausted at the time. Last year, I didn't even consider it because the burnout bug bit me again. This year....?

I don't know. 

Part of me wants to do it again. It always feels exciting and then grueling and then delightful when you succeed on whatever your target was - be it the 50k or whatever else. I feel like I have the energy this year that I didn't have in the past two years. My problem is that I don't exactly have a story in mind. 

See, my favourite activity is not the actual writing. It's the planning. And by planning, I mean PLANNING. White boards and markers, pictures and notebooks, the whole nine yards. I love when I have something that I can explore, prepare, consider, work on. I spend an unending amount of time on it.

But this year, unless the idea lightning bolt hits me in two months, I would be writing without a plan. Which means there's already a 50% likelihood of not making my target. I'm one of those "fail to plan, plan to fail" people who can't pants anything. (pants = flying by the seat of your pants)

I do have a couple of options for if I do pants this thing:

• Colostle: This is a solo-rpg game I've babbled about before that I was very impressed by. If I were to use this as a mechanism to generate content, I will be set for at least... 10 000 words? I think I would be challenged to do a lot of worldbuilding and it would definitely take the form of a journal with 'daily events'. It is a possibility. I think my hesitation with this is that there are so few hand holds in the game and it's so free-flowing, that it's almost too reliant on my own creativity: which makes it daunting. The rules are painfully simple though. It's not something I'm going to get stuck on. It will just be "Can I think up what to do in this situation and stretch it into as many words as possible?"

• Ironsworn Starforged: I haven't babbled about Starforged on here yet, but I have talked about Ironsworn here and here. In Starforged, I think there's a bigger possibility to generate more words than I would in Colostle, but it will have its own challenges. Starforged is a 'prep is play' type of game, where you spend hours worldbuilding and then the story can start. I've done a bit of it, my brother brought me the books when he came to visit, and I immediately jumped in and started playing. The challenge I have is the fact that I still need to come up with an inciting incident. In Colostle, that's supplied. Your character has a list of possible motivations to choose from. But Starforged is very much a blank canvas and I don't know if my ol' noggin will come up with something interesting to start off with. Once I do get started, it's going to be fun. There is a LOT more mechanics and rules to the game, but because of how much I've played Ironsworn, I'm not too bothered by that. The biggest challenge will be the dice rolls. My dice hate me. So I might end up with a dead character. Fortunately, once you've done the world building, it's easy to just generate a new one and tell a different story.

Yes, I'm definitely leaning more towards Starforged, I'll be honest. Maybe my next post should be about Starforged just so that people can know what it is I'm getting myself into.

Other possibilities:

• Fanfiction: I used to be very into fanfics. I know it's controversial because some authors are okay with it and others are absolutely appalled by the very notion that you would dare think of writing a story with someone else's world. I'm of the opinion that it's writing practice and, so long as you're not an asshole about it (trying to claim the author stole your ideas and whatnot), it can explore aspects and situations that might even be insightful. I tend to stick to game fanfiction though as opposed to book fanfiction. The lines feel a little less blurry. But what would I fanfic about is the question. I'm still too angry at Bioware to give Mass Effect a chance. (Yes, yes, I know, it's a game, I should get over it, but I think this grudge might stay with me until I stop breathing). If I do write fanfiction, it might be something like for XCOM or such... but I don't know. I don't know if I'm in the mood or have the capacity to come up with a decent idea. 

• D&D: I think I play too much D&D and spend too much time prepping my homebrew to actually write in it. I think this still classifies to some degree as fanfiction... But anyhoo, I don't know. Here I would have to have a decent plan of action and something I want to write. I've done D&D playthroughs as writeups for Nanowrimo before. It works, it's just not very interesting to me.

• Original fiction: The least likely thing to happen - me coming up with an original idea set in an original world (it would be either fantasy or scifi-ish) is not currently within the capacity of this writer. My big problem with original fiction is that I love world building and can come up with some things that would interest me, but the actual main story? Pffft.

Regardless of what I do, I don't think I'm going to go into the social aspect of Nanowrimo. It used to be a thing: meeting other participants, going to write ins, etc. Heck, that's how I met the person who would eventually get me into D&D. So I am not going to knock it and say it's stupid or something. I just think I don't want to use the full machine that is Nanowrimo and will rather go with the barebones that is the initial concept. 

If I do end up taking the plunge, I'll probably share some of my progress here... maybe.