You might laugh at me for this, but I’m less confident I can win NaNoWriMo this year despite my stunning victory last year. This year Xander has shorter naps and wakes earlier, but that’s not it.

As a few of you know my day job is selling video games, so between COD Ghosts, the Xbox One and Playstation 4 November is a busy month at work, and I’m going from 2-3 small shifts a week to 4 nearly full day shifts per week. Much less time between work and the hurricane, but still there’s more.

I’m trying to get my writing there. I’ve been pummeling my hard drive with new short stories for the last year. Some have been published (Short Circuit and Stolen Hearts), some are polished and under consideration at various magazines and anthologies, but a lot are still rough. The latter stories need work, and I want to work on them. I want to get them up to snuff and send them out too, particularly with my recent successes I want to get more out there and fast (but without compromising quality).

And yet that still isn’t all of what makes me think NaNo is cursed this year. Like a good little prepper I picked my story well in advance and plotted it thoroughly. I liked it so much I decided to use it for my application for the Breakout Novelist Scholarships. Before submitting my application I had some good friends from my critique group give it a once over, and one of them mentioned my plot had some passing similarities to an already published series. Agh! They only have similarities, nothing that would see anyone involving lawyers, but that instantly took the shine off the story for me.

I feel deflated because of all of these things, but I don’t intend to let that get me down. I’m still going to take the challenge and I’m still going to go at it head on, I just hope I can keep everything together for this massive month.

To finish on a positive note here’s a picture of my first home made jack-o-lantern – a lot harder than I thought but also a lot of fun. Like NaNo perhaps?

jack