Earl Grey Books

I can’t believe how quickly October has gone by this year. I swear yesterday was September and now we’re about to head into November and, of course, NaNoWriMo.

I did my first ever NaNo in 2011 and I think I’ve participated every year, with varying levels of success, so I knew I’d be joining this year. Over the last few years I haven’t really been writing that much—around 2011 to 2017, I used to write every single day, but since then I might write something every 4-5 months. I’ve wanted to get back into the rhythm and for me, NaNo is the perfect way to get some writing motivation. If you want to follow along with my progress this year, you can find my page here.

This year I decided to do something completely wild—I decided to actually plot out my story. I’m usually a panster. I like to write zero drafts where I just spend my time getting to know my characters. I usually have some kind of plot or idea I want to explore but I don’t often have a plan of how I’m going to get there. I want to spend the time getting to know my characters, what matters to them and their relationships with one another and then I’ll work on the rest later. Or at least, I will in theory but it’s been a while since I’ve had a completely zero draft to work with.

Like I said, this year I plotted out the story. At least, very basically. I have what needs to happen in what order and a basic structure of everything in between, whether that’s how it’ll work out is a completely different thing. But I’ve spent this week putting that together and getting ready to start drafting on November 1st.

I always tell people that the whole purpose of NaNoWriMo isn’t really to get to the 50k words—in my mind, you win if you end the month with more words than what you started with. But I can’t lie, getting to 50k this year would bring me close to the end of this draft and able to move onto something else while I decide on my edits for this.

We’ll see how things pan out, but I’ll be sharing some updates throughout the month too!