November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) where amateur, or professional, writers aim to write a novel in a month. I’ve never participated, because I’m usually busy writing software. I’m a slow writer, too. As indicated over at the NaNoWriMo site, the goal is to write a 50,000-word (or more) rough draft. This is more novella length than novel, but still a pretty good goal for a month. I imagine having a solid outline ready ahead of time is a good strategy.

Draco Torre Fantasy Novel

Crmoon

This year I started writng a novel on November 1st without any goals. You might say I’m unofficially participating in NaNoWriMo. If I happen to finish the draft this month, I’ll be surprised, and I’m off to a good start at 10,000 words in 3 days. This is a novel I first attempted a decade ago, but realized I wasn’t ready. Not only did my grammar skills need work, I wasn’t terribly practiced at putting stories down in writing. So, I began participating in #FridayFlash fiction in 2009 along with writing other short stories to improve my skills.

At last, I feel ready to write this story. After a decade, I now know this story better than I know myself, thus I may finish the draft sooner than I expect. Finish in November or Decemeber, fine. It’d be nice to finally see it in writing. The novel is based on a character, Draco Torre, which this site is named after. The novel is a fantasy with some creatures similar to those found in Kandy Fangs, but in an older world.

Kandy Fangs: Venom - NINE ﹅ƎИIИ

KandyFangsVenomCover 160

I began a new Venom chapter at the end of October following Nine Thyme. Read the first episode to get a sense as to the backward name. As my secondary writing project, I’ll post an episode each weekend if one is ready. My goal is to keep each episode as much as a complete story for single flash fiction enjoyment with the serial connecting the primary tale together with the other chapters in Venom.

Programming Projects

This month, I’ll be casually working on some ideas for future mobile applications. I have a few ideas that I want to test out before committing to. On the side, I’ll make infrequent updates to Draco RegexTest, a regular expression tool.