Hello and good morning!  I know that it is only September but I am pre-prepping for November, which happens to be NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)!  If you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, it is basically you have one month to write 50k words to create a novel.  There is a whole online community full of writers who use NaNoWriMo as a way to come together and get serious about their writing.  And even though I’m kind of pre-gaming for this amazing writing event, I am looking to make writing part of my every day life instead of an event that happens once a year (three if you include Camp NaNoWriMo).

So here is what I’m doing to get serious about writing.  First, I have looked into all my projects.  I’m the type of person who gets distracted easily with writing.  I can be so into a project and suddenly I have an idea for something totally different and I start following that right away.  Once it’s all said and done, I’m left with thirty different half-finished projects.  Not good when my end result is one final book, not a whole bunch of partials.

I’ve come to a realization that there is one main project that I’ve been playing with for about three years now so that should be my main focus at this time.  I’m calling it my Windy Creek Series, a contemporary romance that surrounds a family running a large industry farm in rural Pennsylvania.  I am a country girl at heart, so a lot of the settings and scenes are coming from memory from where I grew up.  I think I have four books planned for now because I wanted to cover the siblings first.  These characters are the strongest I have ever created, almost like they came to me and are telling me how their stories should be written.

Though I have so many amazing ideas for them, I have not done any real plotting for these.  What happens when I sit down to write is that I can word vomit a good 10k words and get burned out of ideas.  There’s no way of moving the plot forward, no real details.  Basically I have one large paragraph that is a complete mess.  I want quality work, not a word count.

Not only do I need to come up with a better way to plan everything out, I need to actually incorporate writing into my everyday life.  I always write when I have ideas or when I have the perfect environment.  (ie. my desk is clean.  There’s a candle burning.  Music softly playing in the background.)  I need to remind myself that I will hardly ever have that perfect environment.  My life is crazy hectic and loud and I have a job that consumes so much of my time but I need to work around that and sit my a** down and write even when I don’t feel like it.

I don’t know how I’m going to do any of this (the planning, the scheduling writing into my day, keeping the motivation to write) but I know that I am officially setting myself a deadline.  I’ve set myself deadlines for drafts and word counts using NaNoWriMo as a guide but then I always focus on the word counts and give up on the story being any good.  I am giving myself until December 31, 2019 to have a final edited draft ready to be either self published or ready to be sent to publishers.  That’s not saying that I won’t participate in NaNoWriMo.  I love the intensity and the community of it so it’s a must that I want/need that online feeling of other writers to help me kick off this project on a good note.

To all the writers out there that are ready to get serious, let’s do this!  I can’t wait for Prep-tober and seeing everyone really getting into the spirit of writing.