Unofficial Novel Finishing Month

Fall has arrived in Spokane Valley, and with it comes a palpable sense of excitement. Amber leaves, overcast days, warm sweaters… this is my favorite season. Fall is also when my writer’s itch reaches a fever pitch. What to do about it, eh?

Family life keeps me busy, so busy that I can scarcely jot down an idea before I pass out from exhaustion. But I said scarcely! This means I have indeed jotted down several ideas.

The only idea worth sharing concerns the month of October. Specifically, I’d like to set it aside for something special. Sure, November has NaNoWriMo, but this is different. I want my October to become my novel-finishing month.

Let October hereafter be known as Unofficial Novel Finishing Month! Yeah, it’s a mouthful. Let’s do some editing.

Take the first two letters of each word and hyphenate them. This yields “Un-No-Fi-Mo.” Ugly and unwieldy. If we remove the hyphen, we get “UnNoFiMo.” Better, but how do you pronounce it? Is that “Uh, no,” or “Uno?”

Since the letter N appears in both Unofficial and Novel, we can drop one of them. This shortens it to “UNoFiMo.” Mmm, I’m liking the Spanish flavor. But now it reads too much like call letters for a radio station.

Thus, we drop the capital N to a lowercase n and wind up with… drumroll, please!

UnoFiMo. UnoFiMo!

Yup, I like it.

UnoFiMo is an opportunity to pick up where I left off a year ago, or two years ago, or possibly many years ago. It’s time to gather my story’s loose threads and weave them into proper chapters.

If you’re like me, you’ve got a lot of unfinished novels under you belt. Why not designate your own month for UnoFiMo? That languishing draft deserves better. My plan is to continue “The Colors of Magenta,” which I began in 2021. My best guess is that it needs roughly 20,000 more words. If I write 650 words each day in October, beginning today, I’ll meet that goal.

So, what do you think? Will you UnoFiMo with me? It doesn’t have to be October. It doesn’t have to be a set number of words. The goal is whatever your novel needs to become a complete draft.

In the words of the Green Goblin, “Godspeed, Spider-Man.”