Well. Here we are again. It’s that time of year. The time all writers both dread and look forward to.
NaNoWriMo.
To be entirely honest, I’m more than a little bit rubbish at NaNoWriMo. Every year I sign up and every year I have the same result (I never finish).
It isn’t the deadline as such that bothers me, or even the word count. It’s just that as a writer, I tend to dip from project to project (I write on average three books a year) and can never settle on one of them for the WHOLE OF NOVEMBER! Instead, I tend to spread my wordcount over all of my WIP’s, and as such, while November tends to be a successful writing month for me (note: the children are at school for the entire month), NaNoWriMo never is.
I get that it works for some people, but I’m just not one of them.
I actually have four WIP’s at the moment (I know, I know… but I love them all and can’t choose). Two are holiday romances (one of which is already complete, but is still in the editing stage, so I count it still as a WIP until I press that submit button). The next is a medical romance, set during Covid (I know, I know… but I need to get it out of my system, and as they say, writing is cathartic). And the final one, still in the outlining stage, is a second-chance romance (one of my favourite tropes).
I know, at this point, that I need to prioritise the second of my holiday romances. The six months we spent during lockdown when the kids were not in school really cut into my writing schedule, and I’m still playing catch-up with just about everything. I don’t regret for a moment prioritising my kids or my husband during that tumultuous half-year period – it was, for me, absolutely the right thing to do. But I do regret that I won’t have a book out this year, when there should have been two. Still, this holiday romance is incredibly fun to write, and the images I have saved on my iphone for inspiration make me smile every time I see them. Writing this book is easy… it’s like when I wrote ‘Hanukkah at the Great Greenwich Ice Creamery’ in a little over eight weeks… the words are just flowing (and its always a surprise and a pleasure when that happens).
Surprisingly, none of my WIP’s are historical fiction. I have two outlined, but haven’t yet begun work on them. It’s strange, I love reading and writing historical fiction, but with everything going on in the world, I’ve been drawn more and more to contemporary romances. There’s still research involved, but its a different kind to historical research, less time-consuming and less all consuming (I can’t tell you how many wiki-holes I’ve fallen into over the years…). I will go back to my historical fiction one day, but for now, I’m happy to lose myself in a Covid-free vision of the modern world.
I will try to keep on schedule for NaNoWriMo, but I’m not going to stress out about it this year. There are far too many other, more pressing things to be worried about in 2020!
Sending lots of NaNoWriMo love to you all,
Sharon.x
Sharon Ibbotson 