My National Novel Writing Month project this fall wasn’t a novel — it was a memoir. I decided this was allowed, since memoir is, in many ways, closer to novels and than it is to other non-fiction. On the whole, while writing the book last month, I found memoir closer to fiction than I expected.

Writing a memoir this fall surprised me more than anyone. I first thought of this book idea about a week before NaNoWriMo was due to start. It came out of my musings on how to promote my newly completed novel. Publication could be far down the road, but I had the time now to consider issues from the novel that I might write or speak about to attract an audience to the fiction story. Being me with my novel brain, the ideas morphed into a larger concept. NaNo was coming up and I figured, why not give it a try? If nothing else, exploring memoir, a new genre (for me), would be a good writing exercise and, possibly, help me work up some short articles and talks from the material.

And so, my NaMeWriMo project was born. Check out my blog posts today and next week for more reflections as I progressed through the writing process.