I am going to try something a little bit audacious in the month of November: to write every day, averaging (at least) 500 words each day.

I have wanted for years to do NaNoWriMo, but at this point I am unwilling to commit to the time to write 1,600 words of a novel per day—not least because of the up-front planning it would take me not to run out of story-telling steam.

I have also wanted to get my writing muscles back in gear for quite some time. While I have been blogging off and on over the past few years, my rate is much lower than it was even during certain parts of seminary. Perhaps most importantly, my longer-form work has simply come to a stop. I have started and then failed to finish a lot of essays over the past few years. I’d like to see that change.

So, for November, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I’m going to try to write every day. I’m aiming for an average of 500 words per day: a count that should be achievable, even if I don’t get there on every single day. (You’ll note that I missed yesterday… because I did not decide to take on this goal until today. However, I’ve already more than hit my target word count for the month so far, because today’s issue of my newsletter and this post together come out to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 words.)

Note that this is not a commitment to publish those 500 words per days on this site. It is a commitment to write. Some of those words I may throw away entirely; some I may publish here; some will certainly be newsletter issues (both for Across the Sundering Seas); some may be open-source software documentation; some may be actually making progress on some (possibly actually important!) essays that I want to publish elsewhere. But if I actually manage this, I’ll come out of the month with at least 15,000 words written. That’s not a novel worth, nor even a novella. But it does represent a real bump in output, and it should get my writing muscles moving again—especially if I can push some of that into essays and not just off-the-cuff materials like this blog post.

So this is me, rolling up my sleeves and getting to work. If you have been wanting to do more writing, give it a go with me! Write a little, every day. Maybe it’s just 100 words—that’s fine: the point is to keep moving. If you do, I’d love to know about it; shoot me an email!