While NaNoWriMo had its time, and I was sad to see it go, it’s still nice start into the final two months of the year to challenge myself for writing novels. This year, I’ve started my own challenge along adjusted lines.
Introducing my personal Novel November. This isn’t the old “write 50k words,” in November, alone; it has some of my own adjustments in rules.
- Past written novel >50k words you want to publish – build an editing habit:
- Spend exactly 1 tracked hour reading, editing, and reworking it, as you need to publish it; no more
- Track yourself with today’s “position at” with either reading and/or editing, and take a tiny note to follow your own progress
- New novel from 0 to 50k minimum – build a writing habit:
- Spend a minimum 30 minutes a day, writing from scratch, to take your 0 words up to 50k in a month. No full reading, no judging your writing, no editing and reworking if at all possible.
- Choose your writing style:
- Plotter: plan your novel before November 1st – put effort in to write the outline of what you actually want to write
- Pantser: from tiny planning down to zero, fly by the seat of your pants (still an odd saying) to throw things into your story
- Plantser: A mix between the two aproaches, perhaps you have the start and end of your story, with a few middle points plotted, and no idea how to get there – plantser it away!
- Choose your writing style:
- Track yourself with today’s “position at” with word count at start and end of day and take a tiny note that can motivate your to continue your story
- Spend a minimum 30 minutes a day, writing from scratch, to take your 0 words up to 50k in a month. No full reading, no judging your writing, no editing and reworking if at all possible.
The final “Movement” and final “Note” at the bottom intend on allowing you to see what you managed to do in the month as an achievement. Short, sweet, no intense details on this sheet – just complete it!
This year, I will be building my edit habit, with the goal of publishing my book as fast as I can. I keep sharing I want to publish my novel, and I make almost no progress. That’s why this Novel November choice for me is my push to edit Accidental Distances and finally publish it some time soon.
You can obviously use the writing software and methods you always want to, but I have fallen away from my original NaNoE versions 1, or 2, and even moved Author Assist over to Rust + Tauri where I have a much nicer writing software system for myself. I’m enjoying avoiding “big coding models” (cough, GPT anything) from ignoring what I state and keep on making bad background changes so I have to review hundreds of extra files where changes weren’t warranted to fix the forced agent unintelligent code changes.
My goal is not to keep writing software now that moving to Rust has helped me get my software working perfectly, in my eyes. Rather, I am pushing to publish now. Hopefully at least one, or two, people will join in on my Novel November this year!
That being said, yes, to get to 50k you need 1,667 words a day written. Otherwise, if you’re like me with a 44 chapter, ~108k word, novel you need to publish (and have never published before) you can swap the goal to a full front-to-back edit! Yeah I need to go through 3.6k words a day on average reading and editing, or just under 1.5 chapters every day, a hefty task to hit, but the hour habit creation will hopefully stick with me; and I hope to share daily progress here in November on each day when done.
