From around 2016 ish, for a few Novembers in a row I signed up for the big sprint. No, not running, that hasn’t been a thing since about 1990 for me.
Fifty thousand words in thirty days. Approximately 1,667 words a day if you are counting and every writer who participated was. Eagerly entering their daily word count and watching the graph climb in a satisfying way.
I finished it several times and now I have a small crowd of manuscripts living on my laptop in a variety of stages and all belonging to different genres. I have my YA time-travel romp which needs another edit maybe three, a YA zombie apocalypse which needs editing again, an adult madcap comedic chick lit piece which I’ve been dallying with on and off this year and an adult chick lit ish romance which is incomplete. There’s also partials for two mental health non-fiction books and the beginnings of a few others.

This year I had an idea which crowded to the front of everything and I decided to treat it like NaNoWriMo and go for it. It didn’t quite go to plan, it took several months, not one. I began the edit process almost immediately (also not recommended) and it’s been a non-stop, heavy-duty, long-fall into one subject. And I enjoyed it enormously. A complete literary indulgence.

NaNoWriMo has drifted away in a cloud of ill wind since I first joined. The organisation behind it closed after many years and the official challenge is no longer running. The idea of November as a writing month hasn’t died though and I’ve debated participating in these dying days of October. New versions are popping up, including “Novel November” and other community sprints that keep the same heartbeat of daily words and gentle accountability.

I don’t think I can do it in this new and emerging year of Novel November.
I’m querying The Black Book and learning to be patient (see also – champing at the bit like a crazed loon). I’ve forced myself to take some down time, breathe, rest and settle out of the semi obsessive streak it took to get The Black Book to this stage.
I’m also itching to get back to an untitled work in progress that I call the celebrity crush one. It’s not really about fame. It is about the strange relationship we have with our ambitions and fantasies. And how in our favourite novels and once-in-a-blue-moon real life dances with them. My narrator thinks she has a crush on someone safely far away. What she really has is a mirror. The story is a bit chaotic, sometimes funny and full of the private conversations people make with themselves when they want more than they are ready to admit.
I want to indulge myself in her world again. Because it’s fun and because, other than romance, it’s easy to picture being her. She’s considering where her writing takes her, unable to believe what’s happening as she secures a deal. I want to write madly and be submersed back in her world, split between Yorkshire and New York.

If you took part in those old November sprints, you’ll know this feeling. You write fast, you edit even though the advice is not to. You lower your standards. You keep going. The draft you end up with is never perfect, but it is alive, it is a beginning and that is the point. A burning ember ready to be breathed into life. I want that. I crave it.

I’m currently tracking on Query Tracker, willing them to reply and willing them not to all at once. I want a full request, not a thanks-but-no. Each bid is a gamble.

If you’re sprinting this November with any of the new challenges, I’m cheering you on. If you’re not sprinting, I’m cheering anyway. I’ll be over here, deliberately and happily drowning in my manuscript, finishing, editing and obsessing over the pages until they adequately unpick that tangled rush of thoughts and feelings inside me.
Much like the day job.

And if you have a neglected draft on your laptop, take this as your sign. Open the file. Say hello. It’s been waiting for you.