NaNoWri…No?

November rapidly approaches, which means that National Novel Writing Month is almost upon us.
As it stands, I’ve yet to decide if I’m going to participate this year.
On the one hand, work has me pretty burned out, and the last thing I want to do when I get home is have to worry about hitting my daily quota of words, or to bother thinking about plot and characterization and whatnot.
Beyond that, my early morning rising, done in order to make time to work out and to avoid as much of the godawful Northern Virginia traffic that is the bane of my weekday existence as possible, means that I have only a very limited amount of useful consciousness when I get home.
On the other hand, there is the potential for relieving some amount of stress through the use of a creative outlet, and writing is supposed to be cathartic, so it could help me work through some of the…stuff that’s been on my mind of late.
I’m not really holding my breath on that last point, but even so, it is a consideration.
If I’m honest, I’d say that I’m leaning towards “Yes” on the question of whether or not I’ll participate, but I’m not ready to commit to that position just yet.
However, even if I do ultimately decide to participate, there’s another question that arises:  what should I write?
The obvious answer would be a third Fontaine novel that would follow the other two that I’ve written in my last two years of participating in NaNoWriMo, and I do have some ideas for that particular story.
However, I recently had an idea for a short story that, once I put more thought into it, I realized could be expanded out to become a NaNoWriMo novel, and the notion keeps kicking around in my head.
There are some compelling personal reasons to write that particular story (See:  stuff, working through), but while those reasons make writing it more compelling, they probably make reading it a less compelling proposition.
Of course, readability isn’t really much of a consideration, given the rather limited number of people who have any interest in reading anything I write.  Even so, some of the people who have read the previous Fontaine stories might have an interest in reading another.
The other sticking point is that there are certain plot elements to this non-Fontaine story that share some commonalities with the Fontaine story that I would write if I chose to go that route, so then it becomes a matter of asking what’s the point of writing a completely unrelated story that’s similar to the Fontaine story and not just writing the Fontaine story?  Of course, that comes dangerously close to asking what’s the point of writing anything at all, which is a question I’m not at all prepared to attempt to answer…
Still, the point of writing that other story, even with the similar – yet markedly different – plot elements is the exploration of certain thematic elements that would be pretty difficult, if not outright impossible, to properly explore in the context of a story about Fontaine.
So…?