While I never officially announced anything, some of you glimpsed the phrase “NaNoWriMo book” on my project list in this picture and I wanted to explain what that was about.
I’ve written a ludicrous amount of content about NaNoWriMo over the years. Lots of pep talks, lots of explanatory articles about the event itself, lots of tips on writing and meeting the deadline. I wrote it because I’m passionate about the event and for my area in my role as volunteer with NaNoWriMo and ML but this passion has translated into well more than 50,000 words about the 50,000 word challenge. Urged on by my Wrimos, I decided to seek permission from NaNoWriMo HQ to compile this content into a book.
I secured this permission and started to compile my old articles. I’d foolishly thought it would be a simple matter of just collecting the already written content and then publishing it and set the release date for this October. You may have seen the pre-order up on some retailers.
But once I started really working on it, I discovered that there was a lot more work involved than I’d originally thought. Without going into all the details, I realized I would need to rewrite a lot of what I had and then write a bunch of new material to fill out the random articles into a coherent book. I also noticed that the content fell into two distinct types and that I may be trying to shoehorn two books into one. A similar thing happened with eBay Marketing Makeover and I ultimately split that into two books so it’s a possibility that’s out there.
After a few weeks of trying to get it done by sheer force of will, I finally decided I was being ludicrous and cancelled the pre-order. The book is still in progress and will come out eventually, just not in time for this year’s event. In fact, I may be using NaNoWriMo to write some of it since I’m not really sure what to work on this year. It will be done when it’s done and that’s all I’ll commit to right now.
Could I have gotten it done for this year’s event? Absolutely. But at the expense of both my sanity and the book’s quality, particularly after I opted to write The Green Bird in the spring instead, compressing the timeline even more. I’m also trying not to fight my muse so much anymore and she’s really into this fairy tale adaptation at the moment so it was a battle to make myself work in it. I’m hoping actually being in the moment of NaNoWriMo is going to make it that much easier to write about NaNoWriMo and the event itself will help me finish it in good time.
For those of you that pre-ordered the book, I’m sorry for any trouble this may have caused. I’ll keep blog readers updated on the progress of that book as we go and let you know as soon as you can pre-order it again for real this time. For now, I’d just like to ask, what would you most like to see from me in a book about NaNoWriMo?
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
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