Trying to Plan for the Future

Well, it’s almost October, which means you know what’s coming.

I will never apologize for that. Every year, this is what I think of. I am unrepentant.

But it’s true, November is coming and I have no idea what I’m doing for the month. What I’m thinking, however, is that I’m going to use October as a way to organize myself for this, and prepare both in my personal life and my blog life.

…meaning my personal writing life. I have no personal life. I work.

So what I’m thinking of doing is taking one of my innumerable unfinished projects and for the next month try to keep myself in a NaNo style mindset in terms of writing. I keep a line on my tracker in my bullet journal for writing, but that’s in the “don’t break the thread” kind of way, where as long as I write some sentence of original stuff (and I’ve been counting fanfic) that day, I’ve written something. This is a more hardcore, at least a thousand words, kind of writing. I don’t do well with it out of November, and I need to break myself of that habit. I need to be writing consistently outside of one month a year, if I’m ever going to get these projects finished. It’s the one thing I see most commonly in all the writers I admire. They all do something like this. And I need to start.

But in terms of the blog, I’m thinking that it’s going to turn a lot more NaNo-focused in October, and possibly something similar in November. I had a lot of fun back in my senior year of college, working with an on-campus group doing NaNoWriMo, and giving them some tools to start writing. I’m planning on doing something similar for this October. Monday blog posts will be building blocks: how to write convincing dialogue, how to create a character, how to write a setting, that kind of thing. Fridays will be pieces of fiction/writing that use those skills described on Monday. So if I write a post about creating setting on Monday, you might see a passage describing a setting a character has just entered on Friday. (Given my personal struggles with setting, this one is almost guaranteed to occur.) You are absolutely encouraged to share your own writing exercises on the Friday posts! I’d love to see what you’re doing.

November will return to my updates on my own writing, as they’ve been in the past for NaNoWriMo, and Friday will likely be passages from whatever I end up working on. They’ll all be very first draft, and probably very bad, but that’s the glory of NaNo. It don’t have to be good. (I mistyped that, and went to fix it, and realized that I’d unintentionally encapsulated everything I’d been trying to say. So it stays, cringingly bad grammar and all.)

It’s odd, to be going into November this blind. Yes, I have a month to prepare, but in the past, I’ve had a decent idea of what I wanted to be writing by this point. An old idea I was going to revamp, a new idea, something incredibly vague…I had something. This year, not so much.

Maybe that’s a good thing. I may still end up on “write the second half of that book” by November, and that’s okay. If it means I finish something, I’ll be happy. I’ve never finished a book in November.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas about what you’d like to see me cover in October? Anything you’d specifically like to improve on, and would like to see my take on the matter? Comments are always open.

We’re gonna rock this joint.