I Have High Hopes for November

I have high hopes for November.

For a start it’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the time of year when I make sure I get a bit of fiction writing every day – more or less. It’s the month when at some point, I realise that I am well behind my word count, and I have to pull an all – nighter, which is for me probably just a long early evening… It’s about the only time in the year when I work right to the deadline, where at 11 o’clock on the day before, I scream, “Done!”, copy the whole text onto my clipboard, go to the NaNoWriMo website, “paste”, verify the word count and get ready for that screen that tells me how wonderful I am because I wrote 50,000 words in one month.

Whether they are good words, bad words, obsolete words, it doesn’t matter. It’s having cranked out sentence after sentence after sentence in another world that makes me happy. Because every year I discover something different. About myself, about the stories that are trying to get out of me, about all these characters that have a little bit of me in them, (some have lots of me in them, some I hope not so much). So I have high hopes for November.

November is also the time when I hope to finally get to the next final draft of Online Meetings That Rock. Those of you who have been following my attempts at finishing the book know that very soon, it will be two years since I laid down the title. Laid down the title but didn’t nail down the focus, nor the key message. Both of those also emerged as I wrote, as I thought so what I wanted to say, as I quoted some people, but not others. As I included some of my stories, and left out some others. As I gave some pieces of advice, then retracted on them, and gave an alternative –  you see, the more you know about something, the more you know that the answer to every single question is “it depends”… But I think I’ve finally nailed down what I want to say, and I finally nailed down what I want the book to do. So I have high hopes for November.
I have high hopes for November because this is the month when we are giving our business a little bit of novelty injection. We’ll be launching some new workshops, we’ll be “niching down” even more, we’ll be taking our message wider, giving it a wider reach, but targetting a smaller group of people with it. It will be the month when we finish the first draft of our first book as a company: a collection of blog posts that have accumulated on our website. My colleague Maya has been selecting them, curating them and putting them together. This will be the first time that the company itself hits a book-selling platform. I look forward to seeing what happens. I have high hopes for November

Those are some of the reasons I’m looking forward to next month, and there are lots more, but too small to identify maybe.

It will also be the one month in the whole of 2018 when I don’t hop on a plane.

At all.

I have high hopes for November.