Well, it’s now November 4th and I need something to do to distract me from refreshing the Associated Press’s election reporting every five seconds, so I might as well write a blog post.
Here’s the post where I stated my goals for October, but if you don’t feel like following the link, here’s the gist. I had two primary types of goals: sewing goals and writing goals. As far as sewing goals, I had a list of projects I wanted to finish up. As for writing, I wanted to do some NaNoWriMo prep work and revise some stories I wrote during September.
How’d I Do?
Short answer: fine.
On the sewing front, I finished I blouse I’d started before the pandemic. I also started and finished a commission for six placemats, six napkins, and a table runner all with a Halloween theme. I also progressed on a jacket project I started back in March. There was more sewing I wanted to do, but I checked some things off my to-sew list and I’m happy with how they turned out.
Now, on to the writing. I got my outline written and refined. I didn’t do as much worldbuilding as I was planning to do, but that’s okay, I usually expand my world between my first and second draft anyway once I have a better idea of the things I need to explore/codify.
But, I’m super proud of my outline. It went through several serious revisions, including one after I attended SiWC@Home (an amazing writers conference that I highly recommend. Click here for more info). During the final outline revision, I was able to combine two major characters I realized were serving the same purpose. I also was able to drill deeper into conflict points I was underutilizing and map out my character arcs in a more satisfactory way than I had done previously.
Another win on the NaNo prep front: my mom sent me more of my stuff that I had stored at her house and in that box were the maps I’d drawn of this world years ago. So booyah! I don’t have to work based off of a half remembered map! This is especially helpful considering that part of this story takes place on the road.
On the short story front, I got a couple revised and wrote one new one. I’ll focus on further revisions in the new year.
November Goals
I’m just going to focus on writing goals in this post, since the sewing goals carrying over from October.
It’s November, which means it’s NaNoWriMo time (for those who are new here or don’t remember, that stands for National Novel Writing Month, where novelists around the world challenge themselves to write 50 thousands words of a new novel over the course of 30 days). I’ve participated in NaNo to varying degrees of success for years.
Last year I “won” NaNo by planning, researching, and writing a novella. In 2016 I “won” by writing 50 k of an outlined novel that I’ve since rewritten twice. I’ve also lost NaNo due to lack of time or lack of interest in the project I’d assigned myself.
This year, I have plenty of time. I have my outline. I’m in the habit of writing. The only thing that can stop me from achieving my 50k-word goal on this new novel is me and I really don’t want to stop myself.
So far, I’ve pushed through lack of motivation and anxiety and I’m slightly ahead of where I need to be. A new strategy I’m trying is to try to stop in the middle of a scene I’m excited about so that it’ll be easier to pick up my project the next day. I’m not sure how it’s working right now, but we’ll see.
A big thing I noticed on the first day of NaNo, was that writing 1990 words of a novel feels nowhere near as satisfying as writing the same amount of words in a short story. It took me a few hours to realize why I didn’t feel satisfied after exceeding my daily word count goal and the conclusion I came to was that my brain was still geared towards short stories. 1990 words of a short story could be half the narrative or even the entire narrative depending on how short. 1990 words of a novel is maybe a single scene in a story that will have anywhere between 60 and 80 scenes. No wonder I didn’t feel accomplished on the first day.
But now that I’m no longer beating myself up for overachieving, I’m feeling pretty good about my ability to complete NaNo this year.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Hope you’re well and safe and not too stressed out.
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