I had never been a prolific writer.

I had always thought of myself as someone who could only write after the ideas had time to settle... or at least when I had a looming deadline for a writers' workshop. It took me over ten years to complete my first and current short story collection.

After graduating from my MFA program at UNLV, I had just stopped writing or doing anything remotely creative. A lot of that was because I had moved to Japan and I was just living and working and experiencing.

But deep down, I knew it was just something I was telling myself because I felt burnt out and too fraud-like to keep writing.

Then enters some really great people in my life and I started to actually care about writing and just being creative in general. That was about two and a half years ago.

In that time, I was able to send all of my stories in this collection out into the world and find homes for all of them (thank you Duotrope), I had collaborated with an amazing artist and created a graphic narrative around one of them, and I had also started working in inks, watercolors, and pastels in which I have only recently begun to post up on Instagram.

So that's me up until this point. I apologize for taking a bit of time to why this particular post is about Scrivener and NaNoWriMo, but since this is only my second "blog" on my site, I figured for those who are reading this, you might want a little background.

So cue the end of October and NaNoWriMo arrives again...will I or won't I are the questions I ask myself every year. Then, I saw the benefits for those who meet the 50,000 word goal...discounts!! I was super excited because I have been checking out Scrivener and was wondering if I should get it to help with the mapping of longer and larger works.

I made a vow that I would make 50,000 words so that I could save 50% on a $40 bit of software. And I totally did.

Not only did I prove myself wrong... I was in fact a prolific writer... but I was able to create an entirely new short story collection in one month... Take that ten years of trying to write my first collection.

That being said, I, of course, have a lot of work to do revising, editing, rewriting...but all of this came about because I wanted to save twenty bucks...simply crazy.