Passing on Fiction Friday this week

I have been so incredibly busy with work and our domestic life the last few days that I have missed several of my favorite writing prompts. I am a fraid I will pass on this week's Fiction Friday challenge again. I don't have much time available, and I don't want to force the prompts into my Nanowrimo manuscript.

Nanowrimo started yesterday. I was not a horse running off the gate at 12:01 AM on november 1st. I have my outline ready and will start writing tonight. I am not following the rules to the letter anyway, in that my aim is to write a collection of short stories, not a novel.

I don't know what's going to happen. Will I be done by the end of November? Will I have written enough words to comply with their established word count goal? I'm not sure. I have a very modest personal goal. Instead of a whole book, if by the end of November I have one of my stories ready, one story I am proud of, something good enough that I could actually see myself submitting it for publishing, then I will feel like I have accomplished something. It may sound too minimal when compared to the idea of cranking out a 50,000-word manuscript, but crafting a good story is no easy task. I would much rather take my time to to get down the right words, and give me a chance to edit and rewrite, than just keep on puking words on a page with my eye on the word counter.

Is this self-defeating? Why am I second guessing myself? I joined the challenge because I needed a structural parameter to help me get started. The idea of a whole bunch of people writing during the same period appealed to me. Also, since signing up for the challenge I have been able to organize myself. I spent some time pondering what I wanted to do, I wrote an outline of the book, with the number of stories in the collection, their working titles, main plot points and what they are about. I had never done that before, so I can say that there is something I have gained already, regardless of my final outcome on Nanowrimo.