Happy first day of November, my friends!
November is my favorite month because it plays host to one of my favorite holidays – Thanksgiving – and it’s my birthday month. (Which is on Thanksgiving this year! Yay!)
And November is the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’ve been planning for NaNoWriMo all year long and now that it’s here, I’m feeling both nervous and excited.
I’m nervous that I won’t be up for the challenge. I’m nervous about failing. I’m worried about falling behind early in the month and not being able to get back on track. It’s a big order, you know? To write 50,000 words in a month. It will require waking up early, staying up late, saying no to plans with friends, and giving up a lot of my free time. Not to mention, my writing partner is due with a wee baby this month (!), so writing dates will be put on hold for the foreseeable future. (In their place: infant snuggles!)
I’m also so very excited about NaNoWriMo, though. I’m excited about spending lots and lots of time with my characters and in this world I’m creating. I’m excited because I love writing more than anything and I can’t wait to spend all of my free time doing so. And I feel good about my current work-in-progress (WIP). It’s a good story. The plot is strong, the characters are fully developed, and the romance makes sense. It’s a story that I will be able to see through to the end – and then past that, through the editing and revising and publishing process. (Fingers crossed, knock on wood, and all that.)
To help me through this month, I created a calendar. This calendar has my whole month figured out from a word count standpoint. My goal is to write the majority of my words on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (I’m alternating between 3,000 words per day and 2,000 words per day each weekend) and then give myself a bit of a breather on weekdays (1,500 words per day). I also really want to finish the challenge before the last week of the month, since Thanksgiving week is always pretty crazy. I have myself writing 500 words on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday of that week but I’m hoping to be done by the 24th. (When I completed the challenge back in 2012, I finished in 21 days so that’s not an impossibility!)
So, here we go. November 1st. The start of NaNoWriMo. I’ll be providing weekly updates on my progress because I’m an Obliger (another Gretchen Rubin personality type) and I need the outward accountability. I’ll see you in a week, where hopefully – per my calendar – I will be 15,000+ words into this challenge.
Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? How do you feel about writing – love it or hate it?
You TOTALLY got this, girl! This is my second year really doing Nano (I’ve had some half-assed attempts in the past) — I was really stressed last year about falling behind but after I let go of the idea that the draft needed to be perfect, I was able to just…relax and get the words down. This year, I’m doing a fairly substantial rework of an idea I did a full draft for not too long ago. I considered writing a different project but the characters in this one are so clear to me that I just…had to go back. It’s been good so far!
Are you on the official Nano site? I think I commented about this on Insta, but I’m tlparkinson, if you’re there 🙂
Happy writing!
GOOD LUCK!!!!! You are going to kill this challenge!!!