If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'.

15003 ★ 50000

YES! Back in action! Thanks to clever use of cheating totally legit loopholes: none of today's words are actually novel, but they still count through my fancy math.

1. Realize novel is off the rails. I have no idea what I'm doing.
   
2. Do the world-refining, character-building, plot-thinking I should technically have done in October but it was Sparktober and that shit waits for no man.
   
3. Edit into list form ("glossary of terms", "list of characters", etc) and slap some Appendix I, II, III labels on there, like you would find in a real book.
   
4. WORDS NOW TOTALLY COUNT AS PART OF NOVEL.

I'm considering exploiting the system further because it turns out, according to the official rules, that it doesn't have to be a novel so much as a work of fiction at least 50K words... which means a collection of related short stories TOTALLY COUNTS. Because y'all. This noveling shit is HARD. I don't know how to intertwine multiple plots and points of view and pace it properly and it's difficult. I'm a short-story fic writer, guys! It would be so much easier for me to write different points in time/character journeys/historical elements as self-contained short stories instead of trying to weave them all together. Like The Martian Chronicles, which I wouldn't call it a novel, but nano would! HAHA! So, yeah, considering it, but I'm going to have to learn to write a novel sometime if I'm going to keep doing this nano business.

Anyway, I met someone at a write-in with a novel that I want to read RIGHT NOW so much that I wish I were writing it just so I could stay up all night every night and write it faster so I could read it. With so many genres/half-baked ideas/zombies in nano, this never happens! I'm jealous that I don't want to read my book as much as his.