Ideas are cheap.

I heard it said on a podcast recently, the award-winning I Should Be Writing, with the knowledgeable and easy-to-listen-to Mur Lafferty. Ideas are cheap. Anyone can have them, and practically everyone does.

The key is execution.

Most people spend their lives saying “someday.” A few try, fail, and never try again. Others give up too soon, not willing to put the necessary work into getting good at something, or find that the work doesn’t give them any joy.

I went through a nearly year-long dry spell, where very few new ideas were coming to me. I’ve actually made efforts recently to flip the switch. It’s working. Lately, I’ve got more ideas than I know what to do with. What I need is to get better at executing them.

So. For those who don’t know, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Catchy, no? Say it out loud a few times. It just rolls of the tongue. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel from beginning to end during the month of November, with no other reward than knowing you did it and a certificate.

Actually, there are lots of rewards. A sense of accomplishment. The opportunity to network and make lots of new friends. A community off writers with a similar purpose. Frequent encouraging emails from accomplished writers. But I digress.

I don’t have time to do NaNoWriMo this year, with all my other responsibilities, particularly to Uptown Express,  but more on them later. So I’ve decided on an alternate goal.

I’m going to finish a story a week during the month of November.

The process will be just as fast and sloppy as a novel in a month. That’s kind of the point. Shut off the internal editor and just write. Have as much fun as possible. If you get stuck, skip ahead, or have something completely ridiculous happen. The point is to get a lot of writing down on the page and mess with it later. So we’ll see how that goes. So November will be Brad’s Story Writing Month (or BraStoWriMo) and December will be the month of editing and rewrites. Which makes January the month of critiquing and February the month of sending out stories!

I’ll keep you posted on my progress.