NaNoWriMo is a yearly challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. It works out to 1,667 words per day. I’ve been doing it every year since I was 13, and I’ve been successful every year but one.
This challenge has been one of the biggest constants in my life, and one of my absolute favorite activities. There is no question—I will be doing NaNoWriMo every year. Even if I don’t have a story. Even if it doesn’t seem like I should have time. I’ve gotten to be a pretty fast typist.
In fact, in 2013 I started “overachieving.” I got to 80,000 words that year. In 2017 I managed 100,000, and in 2020 I managed a solid 75,000. The latter two weren’t even all novels—2017 saw a sci-fi novella and a fantasy choose-your-own-adventure game. In 2020 I wrote one novel and made a decent start on text for one path of a video game some of my friends are putting together. The chance to try out new methods of storytelling when I otherwise wouldn’t have made the time for it is one of my favorite parts of the whole thing.
Most of the books I’ve written over the last 12 years have been completely unsalvageable. I have no desire to ever read them again, to say nothing of putting in the work to make them publishing-ready. A handful, though, have promise. One has been mid-edit for the past few years. I’m hoping to get it to a finished third draft stage at some point, at least just to say I did. Whether that happens before I have to start the next rough draft to add to the pile is anyone’s guess.
Anyway. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Year 1: Llama Soup (2009)
I wrote this book at 13 years old, on a very old desktop computer that ran Puppy Linux and didn’t connect to the internet because I didn’t have a laptop at the time. To this day it’s one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on. There’s just some kind of magic in being young and writing whatever you want to, just because you like it.
The plot was vaguely as follows: a local dragon nabbed a llama from some traveling llama herders, intending to eat it for dinner. In a panic, the llama promised that he was a magical llama, and if the dragon didn’t eat him, he would grant three wishes. This wasn’t true, but the dragon believed him and kept the llama around, and my some miracle, everything the dragon wished for happened to come to pass. This somehow led to them uncovering a plot to overthrow the royal family and stopping them. I’m fuzzy on the details now, but I can tell you it was hilarious.
Year 7: Untitled (working title Bank in a Cart) (2016)
Initially this was going to be a webcomic, then I realized I was never going to learn to draw well enough to make it a reality and that I might as well just write it as a novel.
The basis for the book is that in a world where thieves and bandits roam around and everyone’s personal wealth is in jeopardy, an enterprising dragon has opened up a traveling bank. This way, he has a hoard that he doesn’t have to work for—people just hand him their money. He keeps the money safe, and anyone who comes to him to withdraw their money will get it back. They just have to find him first.
The book follows this dragon and his unpaid human intern who works as a teller (the cart isn’t very big), a man trying to withdraw his money, a thief trying to rob the bank, and a city guard trying to catch the thief. This universe also has a lot of sentient bird characters.
This is the novel I’m working on rewriting. It’s going to be great, trust me.
Year 8: Untitled, Tablequest (2018)
This was the first year I completed two full projects.
The first, as-yet untitled, was a sci-fi novella focused on a human ambassador to a planet where the native population (including his wife and child) hibernate. I had lived in the UAE for a few years when I wrote it, and I was fascinated with the way expats and immigrants carve their own spaces into the new countries they live in. The story followed the ambassador, a couple of clerk robots that work in the embassy, and a elderly bug alien trying to get a visa to visit her family on Earth. I’d really like to revisit this story someday, once I’ve figured out some plot problems.
Tablequest was written as a choose-your-own-adventure game, heavily influenced by Dungeons and Dragons. It follows three warehouse employees who break their boss’s table and go on a quest to replace it before he notices. They encounter all kinds of problems all the way up the supply chain, ultimately leading them to taking down a corrupt monarch. It was good fun. This one is going to be a lot of work to revise, so I’m not thinking about it right now, but someday I’d love to fill out the different routes and put it out into the world.
Daisy M. Hall 