Another November, another NaNoWriMo

November rolled around again, before I was quite ready for it.  And because I'm a Municipal Liaison, NaNoWriMo season begins a little earlier for me than for everyone else.  I have to start thinking about organizing in September... or at least, I should.

This year, I got a couple of things done early.  The most important things: Shooting off an email to the gaming coffee shop that hosted our kickoff party last year, to see if they could do it again this year, and also emailing the museum, to see if we could rent the conference room again for the museum write-in we've done the past couple of years.

But with those things done, it was difficult to get anything else done.  Usually there are write-ins to plan, Come Write In partner emails to respond to, a Google calendar to set up and maintain, the local forum to monitor, and a writing getaway at the Stanley hotel in Estes Park that we plan most years.

This year, I was having a hard time managing even part of that, let alone all of it.  I've just been so ridiculously busy, between freelance work, nannying, babysitting, and hobbies.  Unfortunately, the other two MLs for my region were having similar years in terms of their workloads -- one had just moved into a new house, and the other was moving.

Since all three of us were busy and in denial that it was nearly November, the kickoff party didn't get announced until toward the end of October (even though the venue had been verified for weeks), and other things happened fairly late in the month too.  And sadly, the other thing that suffered was the planning for my writing project: By the time November rolled around, I had been so busy (and will continue to be so busy throughout the month) that I didn't have the time or the brain cells to devote to throwing myself headlong into my novel.

Originally, the plan was to rewrite my first Ruby Ransome novel this November.  I have been working on revisions during the past couple Novembers and through several Camp NaNo sessions, and I came to the realization that actually, the entire thing just needed to be rewritten.  I wrote it back in 2011, and it shows a lot of my immaturity as a writer, not to mention the hustle-bustle of NaNoWriMo: My character motivation was flawed, my ending was weak, and just in general I've fixed problems and added things to the series in the years since that need to be worked into the first novel.

Just in general, this means living and breathing my novel's world again, for at least long enough to plan and rewrite the book.  I have been working on a short story in my Rubyverse in fits and starts this year, and was planning to have it finished in time to plan the novel for November, but that didn't happen either.

With November descending on me, I realized that I just didn't have the time or organization to do what I had originally planned.  I hope to get back to it eventually, but first I suppose I'll need to get my schedule under control!  In the meantime, I'm going full rebel this month and working on other projects such as blogs and that pesky short story.  So far it's going well and I'm staying on track.  More on that later!