Earl Grey Books

It’s almost November and with that comes the best time of the year—NaNoWriMo. I mean, it’s also kind of the worst time of the time depending on how word counts are going, right? But we’re going for positivity this year, so today I’ll be sharing my plans for November—what I’m writing, what I’ve been doing to prepare and all that good stuff. So let’s go…

The Novel(s)

This section can alternatively be called ‘Why are you like this Ely?’

Look I know that NaNo purists will say that you’re meant to start a new novel on November 1st, but I’m a rebel. I think I’ve been a rebel almost every time I’ve joined in. I just can’t work on one project at a time. It’s the same as not being able to read one book at a time or do one knitting project, my brain is just wired to try and do everything at once. We’re not here to psychoanalyst my brain though, we’re here to talk about novels.

So my main project, which I imagine is going to take up 40-45k of the 50k goal, if not more, is a rewrite of the novel I wrote for NaNo in 2015. I wrote the 50k and then finished the last 15k of that novel over December and January. Then I put it down and decided it wasn’t something worth coming back to until September this year. I replanned the entire story in early October and I’ve just been working on little tidbits about the characters and world since.

I’m usually a planster. I will go in with a very vague plan—I’ll have the premise, usually a start and end and I’ll just pants the middle. This year, I’ve got a more detailed plan of everything that needs to happen and it’s really just the filler around everything that is more vague. That feels good right now but we’ll see how it pans out during the month.

The second project is a novel I’m writing with my friend, Eli. We don’t have a word count goal for this one, just a certain chapter we want to get up to. Right now the plan is to dedicate a certain amount of time to this one every week, so let’s talk about schedules.

My Writing Schedule

I have very little on in the month of November. I do some volunteer work online but other than that, I’m not working at the moment while I take care of my health. So beyond doctors’ appointments and spending time with my partner, I have a lot of time to write in theory.

I think having a schedule in near impossible with chronic health conditions because am I going to be able to get out of bed on Thursday? Who knows? In saying that, I do have a few days set aside.

Eli and I have put aside some time on Tuesdays to work on our project together. Unless I have some random bouts of inspiration on other days, I’ll mostly just be using Tuesdays for this project.

I also know that at least for the first two weeks, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday will be my big word count days. These are the days my partner doesn’t use our home office so it’ll be mine for a few hours. He’s on study leave for the second half of the month meaning I’m going to have to find some new cafes and libraries to work in then.

I’m also anticipating not being able to do much writing on the weekends, bringing my actual writing days down to 22. It means I’d be looking at about 2272 words per day. I honestly don’t know if that’s doable but hopefully, I’ll manage to have a few good days.

I won’t really be updating my progress during the month beyond maybe one post, so if you’d like to follow along with me you can find my NaNoWriMo profile here. Otherwise, I’ll be sharing how I went in December!