After a looooong creative dry spell (seriously, my friends, the end of 2019 and most of 2020 can eat a bag of dicks for crapping on my creativity like it did), I decided to do what I needed to do to shake myself out of it.
So I signed up for NaNoWriMo (that’s Nation Novel Writing Month for those of us who don’t obsessively roll around in all things writing – you can find me here, if you’re so inclined.). Basically, I set out to write a novel (or the equivalent of one) in the month of November. Normally a person attempts to write 50K words in the month. I set my goal at 30K. Which translates to three-ish parts of a serialized novel.
Why 30K? Because it broke down to 1K a day. And 1K sounds doable to me. Especially when you’ve written minimal to nothing for most of the year.
1K? Yes. I can do that. Almost 2K a day? That…didn’t feel like I could work it into my schedule. And I didn’t want to fail myself out before I even started.
FYI, baby steps are still steps, people. Don’t ever let someone tell you you have to make big strides to get somewhere. All the big things in life are made up of little things. It might take me longer to reach the end, but I will get there. And I (hopefully) won’t sabotage myself along the way by getting down on myself for NOT hitting that bigger daily goal.
So where does that put me now? As of the writing of this blog post, I’ve crossed the 20K threshold on words for November. I’d started writing Wild at Heart (Lon and Ivy’s story in the Monstrous World series) before starting NaNo, so this puts me toward the middle/end of part 4 of the series.
The kicker, while I’d originally planned this to be an eight part series, it miiiiight be a little longer. Then again, it might not. I feel like there’s still a fair amount of story to tell and I’m almost at what I thought was the halfway point. As an aside, that really doesn’t mean anything because there’s a lot of word-ground left for me to play with and the story might surprise me with how it comes together. Then again, maybe this will end up being a super long story. WE’LL SEE!
(As another totally random aside, I am honestly amazed by authors who are all “Hey! I’m writing this book right this moment and I 100% know it will be finished in 2 weeks and you’ll have it in your hands on this specific date.” Like, whoa. WHOA. That’s some sort of black magic right there.)
To make a long story even longer, November has been good to me. I’ve got a chunk of writing under my belt over the first half of the month and I’m feeling good on where things are heading.
FYI, I’m tentatively eyeballing Wild at Heart as a Spring 2021 release. I have a book or two (or three) waiting in the wings for early 2021 and spring gives me plenty of time to finish writing, get edits done, and work on covers (GAH! Covers! I WILL NOT LET YOU DEFEAT ME!) without feeling rushed.
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