NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo starts in a week.  I still don't know if I'm going to try it or not.  Even if I do, it probably won't be "official."  November seems to be a good month for me usually, though.  (How do I know that?  This chart.  Incidentally, stories I start in July are apparently doomed.)

I have options that would work - at least a dozen random ideas written down, though some of them just don't entice me at the moment.  I have one I really like, but I can't bring myself to write it; it's sad, and I can't very well write in public if I'm going to be crying all the time.  (I have a short story idea like that -  I thought it up on the drive to work one day and made myself start crying.  Luckily it's a 45 minute drive, so I had time to calm down.)

So what's the problem?  Why not give it a go?  (Hell, I used to get 15 or 20 pages into things, not just jot down the idea.)  Well, the first problem is that NaNo is supposed to be something new.  I'm kind of itching to rework the dormant web comic in text, but I couldn't very well do that for NaNo; I've got quite a bit of dialogue written out for that.  And I also reread a chunk of the Veran stuff recently, and that always makes me want to get back to it.  (I'm still not done revising the first, and there's ~270 pages of handwritten manuscript that need serious cleanup for some of the intermediary parts.  It might be better served by a complete rewrite, start to finish, but with the sheer quantity of what I've got written on it (pre-editing, looks to be in the neighborhood of 200k words) and that there are two parts mostly unwritten yet is kind of daunting.)

The second problem is the more likely issue, though:  I get distracted.  If I'm supposed to be writing on something, and have a deadline, invariably I end up putting a lot of thought to something else.  (Back in the spring when I was working on my research seminar paper on Westerns, I couldn't get the idea for #155 (the one loosely inspired by the American Revolution) out of my head.)

So I'm not sure what I'm going to be writing on in November.  I have a lot of ongoing projects, and in some ways I feel guilty starting anything new, as though doing so neglects what I've already got going.  I suppose that could be said of several of my hobbies, though - websites, reading, etc.