Hello!

As we have moved quite swiftly from Summer into Autumn (even though it sometimes feels like winter!), the approach of November means two things for me – my wedding anniversary and NaNoWriMo!

If you’re not familiar, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and is an online writing challenge where you can connect with writers all over the world who attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s much more of a thing in the US than it is in the UK I think – I’ve only ever met a handful of people who have taken part in NaNo, let alone built a community around it but there are plenty of support posts, forums, area groups and social media content if you’re looking for a writing community!

It’s always been quite a solo challenge for me – I vividly remember the first time I achieved the 50k word goal and I was 16, my best friend at the time had just had major back surgery and I was really struggling to cope with how to be a good friend in that scenario, I was taking my GCSE mock exams and taking dance classes 2-3 times a week. How I managed it without breaking down honestly baffles me!

Over the years since then I’ve participated in NaNo a handful of times – nothing as successful as 2012, though there were a couple of years where I did successfully hit the word count goal but not in one solid project. I usually used it as a motivator to try and make creative writing a habit for me as it was when I was a teenager and I think 2022 was the closest I came to success – I hit the 50k goal by writing on only 19 of the 30 days (one of those days I didn’t write was also my wedding day) and then in 2023 I set myself an annual goal of writing 1,000 words a week as well as completing NaNoWriMo and I believe I did both!

2024 has been much rockier – I upped my goal to 2,000 words a week and just haven’t been able to maintain that consistency. I really wanted to focus this year – work on one, maybe two projects, throughout the year, but I have struggled with maintaining motivation as well as balancing a lot of tricky mental and physical health stuff this year. One of my ideas, a contemporary romance novel, I’ve hit a wall with it because the third act conflict is such good conflict, I have absolutely no idea how to resolve it!

But onto my hopes and expectations – the basic one is to write 50,000 words. A greater one would be to stick with one idea and actually complete a draft of a novel. The most ambitious one is that I use the event to put myself into a really great routine where I fix my sleep schedule, become someone who can actually stick to a routine every single day and maintain balance in every other aspect of my life, but that’s where the difference between ‘hope’ and ‘expectation’ lies.

I have one idea that I’ve been thinking about for the last few weeks – it’s based on a piece of fanfiction I wrote in 2015. I used to have a relatively successful fanfiction blog on tumblr and I had a request for a ‘prompt’ (which I often wrote cute little 200 word scenarios in response to) and this one evolved – I wrote 2000 words without stopping of a story that seemed to tumble out of my head without me really thinking about it. Those are the moments of writing I aspire to and I want to see if I can turn it into a full length story.

The fanfiction element was very, very tenuously linked so I don’t need to worry about making sure to differentiate it from the source material, but there has been a very steep rise in published books that have been adapted from fanfiction so who’s to say it can’t work for me too!

I need to do some brainstorming and proper planning over the next week before November 1st creeps up on us, but my current idea can be loosely described as a fantasy romance book with pirates, sirens/mermaids (I need to do some more research about them), forced proximity thing? I described the original short story as ‘sort of Pirates of the Caribbean meets Sinbad meets Peter Pan’ and even now the concept of writing it excites me.

My biggest issue is that I can spend time planning and end up with about 5,000 words of planning mixed with bits of dialogue and random moments written in full and then I lose steam and I no longer want to write it, I just want to read the finished story.

Basically, as soon as it gets hard, I give up.

This is a character trait I’m trying to write out of my own narrative!

I have, in writing this post, thought that perhaps as an incentive to commit to my novel this year, maybe I can get the NaNoWriMo tattoo I’ve been thinking about since I finished my first novel in 2012. That might be the incentive I need.

Please let me know if you’re doing NaNoWriMo! I’d love to start a group chat or something with other writers to support each other through the month. And if my idea sounds even a little bit appealing, please let me know – I need the motivation!

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx