Some stuff went down with NaNoWriMo before the official non-profit closed. But the original founders created a new thing, and I signed up just now. I’m participating as a NaNo Rebel, which is to say, I’m writing something that’s not a novel. I also have set my word count goal much lower than the standard 50K.
I attended Fan Studies Network North America this weekend. I always find fan studies conferences energizing. As a post-academic PhD holder whose only institutional affiliation is with a PreK-12 school, any scholarship I do will make me an independent scholar and while that has some limitations (a lot of limitations), it also comes with some freedoms. Including researching whatever I want and not caring how publishable it is, where I publish it, or if anybody but me finds it useful.
I mean obviously I want other people to find it useful. But it’s okay if they don’t.
In their presentation, “Who counts as a fan? Pre-discursive boundaries of fandom in early childhood,” co-authors Giulia Villani and Danilo Calaresi mentioned that children are an understudied population in fan studies. I’ve recently started feeling like maybe I could engage in scholarship again (it only took 5 years from my defense for me to recover!) and I’d been casting about for my current area of research interest. This is tied to my day job, to my interests as a parent, and to my interests as a person who has engaged in fannish behavior since I myself was about 3 years old. (The Muppets were my first fandom, in case you’re curious, if we’re counting things like acquiring merchandise as a fannish activity. And we are.)
So for AcWriMo/NaNoWriMo, my goal is to write a literature review of at least 1500 words synthesizing the current research literature on children and fandom. To arrive at this word count goal, I looked at the lit review chapters of my dissertation and divided each of their word counts by 5, as I had about 50 references for each of those and so far I’ve only found 12 for this project. They clustered around the 1500-word mark, so that’s where I set my goal.
But my real goals, more than a word count, are by the end of the month to have:
- a concept map of the literature in this area
- a synthetic note for each article or book chapter
- a list of ideas for future research in this area, including possible action research to undertake in my role as a school librarian
I’ll try to blog throughout the process, too.
Here are my NaNoWriMo 2026 badges!
