November Break + Writing Update

With NaNoWriMo upon us and feeling super drained from work, politics, and pandemic, I’m going to take another month break in November. I want to store up some inspiration on what to do with this blog and how to approach book spotlight posts. I might still publish Hump Day Happiness posts because they’re easy and important to remember amidst everything going on, especially since it’s November. Buuut we’ll see. No promises.

But before I disappear for the next thirty-ish days, I wanted to give a brief update on the writing I’ve been working on and plan to work on.

For most of the past few months, I’ve been editing my YA contemporary story, Lost and Found. This is the first time I’ve really sat down with feedback from writer friends and edited something thoroughly. I added scenes, deleted things that didn’t make sense, hopefully improved the plot arcs, and combed the story for better word choice and voice. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s also been good work. I feel like I’ve accomplished something and that this is a great leap in my writing experience.

With that project finally completed and send off to a few friends to read again or for the first time, I’m changing gears to participate in NaNoWriMo. I have absolutely no idea if I’ll actually hit 50K this year. With how everything feels at work and wanting to just come home and chill, my motivation to write a ton of words each day does not seem likely. Of course, that could change as I get started, but I’m trying to convince myself it’s okay if I don’t hit 50K as long as I make some kind of writing progress.

That being said, I’m also “rebelling” for NaNo this year, which isn’t anything new since the past few years I’ve rebelled as well. I plan to attempt to once again write a story that I’ve dubbed The Airplane Novel, which is about a girl who learns to fly an airplane, despite it being illegal for women to do so, in order to save her brother who has disappeared.

I should have done more research for this story, but I’m bad at doing research so my goal is to fix the plot and take all the scattered scenes and ideas and shape them into something that’s a little less bumpy and makes more sense in the end. Then, I’ll try my hand at the research side of writing.

I’ve written a quite a bit of the story, but it’s unorganized—I don’t even have chapters! Why do I do this to myself?!—and there are a lot of scenes that are similar in nature but I rewrote them several times so they’re all a tiny bit different. So sorting through that and filling in the gaps is going to be so much fun.

Meanwhile, I’ve contemplated rereading the story I wrote last spring (most of it during my time off because of the pandemic), but I’m afraid if I do start rereading, I’ll want to start rewriting, so I might just hold off until December or next year for that.

I seem to write stories in cycles. I’ll start something, abandon it for months or a year or two, then pick it back up to finish. Then leave it to sit for way too long and want to reread and fix it. I guess there’s progress somewhere in that process.

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