DenNoWriMo at Fan Expo Denver

We’ve had a lot going on behind the scenes lately with DenNoWriMo, which is the former Denver region of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).  This weekend we’re actually at Fan Expo Denver with a community table to let our region know we’re still here — and hopefully pick up some new participants as well.

About DenNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo — and now DenNoWriMo — has always been a labor of love for the three of us who run the program in the Denver area.  For those who aren’t familiar, National Novel Writing Month was the (actually international) challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November.  While the challenge primarily existed online, the Denver region was a very active in-person community, and we organized a ton of write-ins (where we literally get together with other participants and write) and other events.

So when NaNoWriMo closed down last year, we decided to keep going on our own.  We had already started distancing ourself from NaNoWriMo the previous year, calling ourselves FauxNoWriMo in 2024 (when NaNoWriMo was still operating).  When they announced they were shutting down for lack of funding, my co-organizers and I rechristened ourselves Denver Novel Writing Month and carried on as usual in 2025.  This year we made it official with a 501(c)(3) designation.

Come See Us at Fan Expo Denver!

The Denver NaNos table at Fan Expo has been a thing for years, since the event was Denver’s Comic Con (later Denver Pop Culture Con, and finally bought out by Fan Expo).  This year we’re trying to spread the word that we’re still here, as we lost contact with much of our region when NaNoWriMo reorganized (and began their death spiral) in 2024.

If you miss NaNoWriMo and the writing community the challenge offered, feel free to check us out.  We’ll be at Fan Expo Denver all weekend, but you can also check out our website and join the mailing list from there.  While we’re primarily based in the Denver area, we also have an online community, and long-distance participants are always welcome.

Writing Again

After nearly two months, I am writing again.

I hope.

I’d been thinking about writing again since our write-in (which we hold year-round now) on Tuesday, but I had a busy week and didn’t get around to it right away.  But yesterday, I had some time and a good idea, so I opened Scrivener.  Before I knew it, I was writing.

And before I knew it, an hour and a half had passed.

I’m not saying “I’m back!” or promising I’ll stick with it this time.  But I’m glad to be writing again.

I’m not even sure how or why I stopped.  I’d been so happy, having resumed my near-daily writing habit.  But then I got busy (a lot), and then I got sick (most of April), and I had a bazillion other things to do.

But here we are.  I am writing again, and I hope to get back into the habit.

Again.

My April Reads

I really like this feature of Fable’s that creates an image I can share on social media.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, Fable is a really good app to track what you’re reading, as well as what you’re watching (although I don’t use it for the latter part).  It imports from Goodreads and provides some good statistics, although not as much as Storygraph.  (I like the interface and the social networking features better than Storygraph, though — Fable has a light social media-type community, as well as a platform for book clubs.)  If you’re looking for an alternative to Goodreads, I highly recommend Fable.

I didn’t blog about my monthly wrap for January or February, but I read three and four books those months, respectively.  If you saw my reading wrap for March, you know April blew all of those months out of the water.  Seriously!  I doubled the number of books I finished between March and April, not to mention I also nearly doubled my books for the entire year: I am up to 23 books for the year, and 10 of those were finished in April.

I’m not sure what changed, exactly, except maybe a bunch of good book coming across my “currently reading” list.  A couple of those were also books that I had been reading in the background for a while (whenever I could get them out from the library, basically) and finally finished.  I don’t usually like reading more than one book at once, but that’s been happening a lot lately, usually because I wait too late to start something and it goes back to the library while I’m reading it, so I start something else.

I also have been listening to more audiobooks lately, which accounts for two of this month’s books (and four of the five in March).  I’ve found I enjoy listening to nonfiction while I do something that would normally bore me, such as driving, cleaning, putting away laundry, or showering.  It’s also useful as a body doubling method when I’m trying to overcome a lack of motivation to get something done.

In any case, I’m enjoying reading a little more often, and hope to continue doing so.