Written by Anita Olsen Stoebakk
The second week of NaNoWriMo has come and gone, and in my humble opinion it happened too fast!
I find myself lagging behind on my writing quite drastically after this past week—I have my reasons I assure you. I do live shows and sometimes host events at conventions and this weekend I was working at a three-day convention in Oslo, Norway. My partners in crime and I had the honour to host interviews, hold D&D workshops, and even play a live session in front of an audience. Suffice to say, I have had no time to write since early Friday, and even had to skip one of the weekly writing workshops we had planned for Thursday evening. There were just too many things to do, which becomes very demotivating. Life can be unpredictable and messy sometimes, and a lot of you are probably facing a similar situation.
So, what do you do when you lose steam and motivation? When it looks like finishing your novel is nothing short of impossible? You keep going! My advice to you is to not give up now. Even if it is hard and tedious to play the catch-up game, it will be worth it in the end. If you keep going, you still might not finish on time, but you will have given it your very best effort, and that is something to be proud of. The quickest way to not finish a NaNoWriMo novel is to give up.
One of the reasons why I keep coming back to this challenge is because I want to push myself, I want to prove that I can do it, and I think you can do it too!
If you are in need of some inspiration or just some pleasant company you can watch last week’s writing workshop where my writing buddy Ingrid and I talk about our progress, read out the opening sentences to our respective novels, and discuss character creation some more.
The next workshop will be livestreamed on Tuesday, November 14th at 09.00 pm UTC+1. Ingrid and I will be reading longer excerpts of our novels and discussing out thoughts. If you have any questions or if you want to send us an excerpt of your novel to read, please do!
How is your NaNo-novel coming along? Let us know in the comments!
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