Recap: Not-Novel Writing Month is much better than the real Novel Writing Month

For anyone who may not know, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), when writers attempt the Herculean labor of writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. This year, I got wind of a different challenge; a not-novel writing month, as it were, in which the goal instead is to write a flash fiction story every...

National Not-Novel Writing Month, day 21: Return of the Silent Kid

This is a followup to The Silent Kid, which is the first Not-NaNo story I posted three weeks ago. I wrote this on Nov. 21 at a NaNoWriMo write-in I went to with my daughter. She's doing the regular NaNo, while I'm doing something a little different. A ghostly smile flitted across Sunny Jim's face...

National Not-Novel Writing Month, day 15: A Robocraft story

I play only two video games: Minecraft and Robocraft. What I like about both of them is that they don't feel like video games to me. As a kid (and as an adult when my kids gave me a great excuse) I loved building awesome futuristic vehicles out of Legos and imagining them in combat....

National Not-Novel Writing Month, day 8: The Kiss

I've been doing the flash-fiction every day NaNoWriMo replacement as prescribed. Most of them are rudimentary or fragmentary, but I thought this one came together rather nicely. So here you go. The Kiss It wasn't Scott McHaney's fault that his town collapsed. He was only the mayor, after all. How was he to know what was...

National Not-Novel Writing Month, day 1: The Silent Kid

Apparently if you're doing the short-story-per-day challenge instead of NaNoWriMo, you're supposed to also post it on your blog. I hesitate to do this because it'll be painfully obvious if I fail to keep up, and also because I'm not sure I want everyone to see my first-draft stuff. But oh, well, what the hell....

A novel non-noveling idea for National Novel Writing Month

A new flash-fiction story -- 500 to 1,000 words -- every day in the month of November. That's the challenge. I had all but decided to ignore National Novel Writing month this time around until I found this non-noveling NaNo idea over at EmperorPonders. The last few attempts at NaNoWriMo have left me jaded on...