IWSG: The best month for writing?

 

It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group post. The IWSG is the brainchild of the amazing Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh. Since we are all insecure and can use all the support we can get, huge thanks to Alex and this month's co-hosts,
Pat Garcia, Sylvia Ney, Liesbet @ Roaming About Cathrina Constantine, and Natalie Aguirre!

 

Each month we have an optional question to spark discussion. 

This month's Optional Question: are there months or times of the year when you are more productive than others, and why?

Let me know what you think!

I think this is the flip side of the question about when it is hard to write, or what makes it hard. I've commented in the past that travel/vacations mess with my ability to write regularly, since there tends not to be a lot of down time, and a lot of distractions. Aside from the obvious corollary that writing happens more when I'm at home, I'm not sure when I write best. The truth is that I don't really know what life looks like going forward, so I might not be able to give a reasonable answer to this question.

But: in the past, my most productive writing times have been ones without travel, and usually with the extra incentives that NaNo offers. By incentives, I mean both the gimmicky things like the histograms showing progress toward the utterly arbitrary 50,000 words, and the community of writers who are all doing the same thing, and offering support and encouragement to each other. So November, despite the holiday distractions, has been a productive month for me in many years. This year I'm hoping to be ready to start a new novel in January or February, and to dive in hard and fast, NaNo-style, once I'm set.

 #

The Writing Report: Unlike other Novembers when I've had a novel going, this year I was just editing and organizing old stories into collections, and when I took off to spend Thanksgiving with a small corner of my family, progress on that ground pretty much to a halt. The project just didn't have the sense of urgency drafting a novel does. Still, I need and want to finish the collections, so I'll be ready to get back to Death By Donut as soon as my beta readers are done with it. So I guess I'd best get cracking!