Report from Camp NaNoWriMo: My Prep

As July approached, I started to collect all the notes and scrapes of stories that I have been meaning to write this year. It is no surprise that I had a good few to write. I mean, I try to write short stories that amount to something of substance every year. In a way, I will write enough short stories to fill a manuscript, complete and sovereign.

The real challenge, however, is how to write so many short stories in such a small period of time. I had never done that before.

When I write short stories, and I have written hundreds of them, I do so very very slowly. On average, I write one short story a month. I've been doing this for almost thirty years. That's a lot of short stories.

Even in prolific times, I have not really been able to write more than a story a week. So, this as a challenge would be difficult.

It was only difficult because it was something I had not done before.

So, I decided that I would write a short story a day until I finished the project.

I had parts of ideas, up to partially written scenes. It was just a matter of doing the right thing by each story.

My prep was simple, I made an outlandish demand on myself and I kept my pile of notebooks at my side. I decided I would work for about three hours a day. I figured three hours would be enough time to write a story ranging in word count from 2,500 to 4,000.