Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

So every November, thousands of people around the world participate in a lovely writing project called NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, wherein they write a novel in a month. And the idea is that if you just write every day and don't worry too much about getting it right, then you can write a 50,000-word novel in a month which is an astonishment to me because while I have written 2,000 words in a day, I definitely have not been able to do that 25 days in a row.

Anytime, I start a new writing project I manage to convince myself it will be quick and easy. Like, a few years ago when I started writing about tuberculosis, I definitely thought this is a small and straightforward project with a limited audience and no risk of a movie adaptation. It won't be that hard. And I think I was correct about the risk of a movie adaptation but it has not turned out to be a small or straightforward project because tuberculosis turns out not to be a small or straightforward concept. And anyway, what I'm writing isn't just about tuberculosis, it's also about how tuberculosis is a form and expression of injustice.  So yeah, not only did I fail to finish that in a month, like,  here we are 3 years later and I've still failed to finish it.

And then a couple years ago on November 1st, I wrote 2,000 words of a new story and again I thought, "This is a fairly straightforward and contained story. You know approximately how it ends. You can do this." Uh-oh, uh-oh. Sneezes Oh nom sneezing is never normal. But right, on the first day I wrote 2,000 words and I thought, "If I just do this for 30 straight days, I'll have a 60,000 word novel." The problem was that by the fifth day, I was like, "Oh my God, there's so many problems with what I wrote on the first day and the second day." And that's just sorta how I write. I write and I write and then I delete and I delete and I write and I write and delete and delete, and that builds layers over time that eventually become something hopefully that I'm happy with. Writing and revising are kind of inextricably linked for me and I don't really think of them separately because even the initial act of writing is a kind of rewriting for me because I'm trying to take ideas that exist in sort of nebulous forms in my head and turn them into language which is sort of rewriting.

You know what, I don't want to harp on this but maybe it wasn't a sneeze. Maybe it was a momentary lapse in judgment, but anyway, the point is that I have this wildly inefficient way of writing. And I think I just have to live with it which is why in 2007, at the dawn of vlogbrothers, I created an alternative to NaNoWriMo called NaFaDoYBIMSCoM, also known as National Finish a Draft of Your Book I Mean Seriously Come on Month. And over the years, I've been able to use a few months this way. Like in 2010, I completed a draft of my book The Fault in Our Stars in mid-December after attempting NaFaDoYBIMSCoM and I completed a draft of Paper Towns in November of 2007 during my first ever NaFaDoYBIMSCoM. It occurs to me, by the way, that I used to be very open about my writing process and, like, where I was in the writing of a book. And then after The Fault in Our Stars was published, I felt like I really couldn't do that even on vlogbrothers because suddenly like there were lots of people putting lots of pressure on me and, like, trying to figure out, like, which season a book would come out in because that had, like, implications for a publicly traded corporation. But now I feel like I can talk about it. I'm trying to finish something. I'm not quite ready to call it a book, but I'm trying to finish something, and that's why I'm trying to do NaFaDoYBIMSCoM here in November of 2023.

Uh, maybe I should just tell the truth, which is that I've already finished a draft. This is more a NaFaRoYBIMSCoM, Finish a Revision of Your Book I Mean Seriously Come On Month. But at any rate, I'm supposed to be writing and so far, it's going terribly because I'm just a smidge depressed and anxious at the moment. But I'm hoping that by revealing my plan, I can jumpstart the execution of it and anyway, over the last 20 years of writing stories, one thing that's been extremely helpful for me is implementing artificial deadlines and then pretending that they're real. Look, almost every form of meaning is constructed, right? Like, we convince ourselves and each other that this stuff matters because that's how we get stuff done together. And I need to convince myself that this revision is due at the end of November 2023.

So this November, whether you're doing NaNoWriMo or NaFaDoYBIMSCoM or something else that ends in M, I hope that you're able to complete your deadline and meet your goals and I hope that I'm able to as well. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.

The best part of that video was where you said I'm just a smidge depressed and anxious, but you know what, like, uh, you like editing video and you're gonna go edit this video and that will be good so...still recording.