30k hath November…

Setting myself a writing challenge for next month, and feeling far too pleased with the pun in the title!

November, from Gemma Koomen’s 2024 Calendar

It’s been about 2 months since I started my Substack newsletter publication blog. Let’s go with blog. This is my 4th post. I’ve published once a fortnight, each post on a (different) topic that’s been occupying my mind that week: eldest daughters, family stories and secrets (real or imagined) and a memorial to my lost computer. I’m enjoying finding my feet (and my voice), as well as the challenge of writing in public.

But…I’m also working on a larger writing project that’s gradually resolved itself into a memoir, and I have limited space and time in which to write. Writing happens in slivers and snatches of time before my children wake up, during my lunch break at work, on the sidelines of a hockey or football training session. My two writing projects (memoir and Substack) are competing for my energy and attention.

I don’t want to focus entirely on Substack at the expense of my larger writing project, something which I think would be very easy to do. Writing a post of 1000 words or so feels infinitely more doable than grappling with an amorphous multi-strand narrative that largely exists in my head! But equally, I don’t want to abandon this space and devote myself entirely to my offline writing. Diving into Substack this year, first as a reader and then as a writer, has been a joy. I’ve enjoyed reading interesting and thought provoking articles on a myriad of topics, discovering writers I want to read more of that I might never have come across otherwise, and tinkering around on the edge of what feels like a largely supportive community (or several separate but interlinked) communities of people who love words as much as I do.

A note from

Jaimie Pattison

popped up in my feed last week, restacking another note by

Simon K Jones

setting out how he would approach doing a November 50k word writing challenge on Substack. I liked the post and commented that it was indeed an excellent idea, and that I was tempted to adopt it as a way of increasing the word count on my work-in-progress. That temptation has continued to grow stronger in the days since. It feels like a perfect solution to my problem: spend more time and energy on my memoir project while also posting regularly on Substack. Aiming to write over 1,000 words a day for 30 days makes me feel both excited and terrified - and isn’t that how all the best goals should make you feel?

Is it possible? Can I do it? How will I do it?

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So…I’m going to do it. This is me declaring my intention and commitment to a month of daily writing. I’ve decided to reduce the total target word count from the traditional 50,000 words by the end of November to a slightly more manageable 30,000 words. This gives me a writing target of 1,000 words per day. As

Simon K Jones

suggests, I’ll publish each day’s words here, or to a dedicated section of my fledging Substack space, regardless of quality. They may be terrible words (although hopefully with some small gems glinting inside them!), they will definitely be unedited words, they might be repetitive and approach the same topic from several different angles, but they will be words.

I hope to will end the month with 30,000 more words than I’ve got now, and hopefully a much clearer idea of where this writing project is going and the ideas I’m really interested in exploring further. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads my words or not. My main aim in publishing them is accountability to myself and to an imaginary audience. I’m definitely someone who works better with an external motivation - if I don’t announce this goal publicly and just try to quietly work on writing 1,000 words a day for myself, I know I won’t make it past the first week! I might choose to put the posts behind a paywall or make them private after November is done (likely to depend on how shit or otherwise the words turn out to be!).

To any potential readers: please note that all the traditional nanowrimo caveats will apply. My focus in November will be on quantity rather than quality. I’m interested in exploring using Substack as a space to experiment and explore, to share unfinished thoughts and words in progress, rather than shiny finished pieces that have been polished to perfection. As

Ruth Allen

put it in a recent post introducing her latest offering (Regolith, which is sold out but I hope may be offered again next year):

“As a sedimentary geologist and psychotherapist I suppose I would say this, but I really think we don’t give enough time and space to all that is unfinished and even a bit incoherent within us. What is with our cultural story of completion?”

I feel like this is the permission slip I need to be a bit incoherent in November! My aim is to end the month with a shitty first draft (or at least the start of one): 30,000 unedited words, produced at speed and under pressure in those slivers of time and space I talked about at the start of this post. I hope to be able to get out of my own way, to find ways to escape my inner perfectionist and just write. I’d love for you to join me.

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Here’s my blurb in progress for the memoir writing project I’m going to be working on over the next month:

Motherline: a working title

How do we remember and forget our immediate ancestors? What are the stories we choose to tell and which stories are forgotten or hidden? This memoir will be framed by four generations of eldest daughters, spanning the twentieth century and taking place mostly in Liverpool, North Wales and County Durham. It starts with a collision between death and life over a two week period in the summer of 2015 when my mum died and I conceived my younger child. It’s about family stories and family secrets, and my attempts to uncover and understand both the stories and the secrets as I try to relocate myself in a new role as the only living woman in my family.

This is the shape I think my memoir project will take, now. My first and second posts explore some of its strands in a little more detail and are linked below, if you’re interested. I fully accept that it’s likely to change, in small ways and in large ways, through the course of writing it. Maybe even over the next month. I’m excited to find out (and still mildly terrified at the thought of writing 1000 words a day for the next 30 days!).