Week 5: Doing what feels good + NaNoWriMo anyone?
Dearest readers,
Thank you for signing up to my newsletter 🤗 After sharing a few posts on Medium documenting the last four weeks of self-isolation, I've decided to give writing newsletters a try. As the self-isolation continues, I've felt an increasing need to reach out to people online in a meaningful way and, newsletters I'm told are more intimate than blog posts.
I also have another not-so-secret motive: I want to get better at writing. My hope is that having a weekly deadline will force me to churn something out - I can only hope that the results will be adequate enough to stay out of your spam folder! So does that mean you'll receive one of these every week? Yes, although I might occasionally throw in an extra one if I'm burning to share something. Like this past week, where I simply had to write about my new-found love for the Netflix show The Circle.
So, back to the newsletter. With week 5 of self-isolation and home office coming to a close and no end to social distancing measures in sight, I've started giving myself permission to do more of what I enjoy. With a lot of other past-times like hanging out with friends on hold right now, I've become a lot more aware of which quarantine-friendly activities are making me happy and which ones aren't.
Take reading for example, I have a soft spot for non-fiction: books on management and leadership, popular psychology and feminism. While I've never stopped myself from reading books on those topics, I've often tried not to read two in row, making sure to sandwich a more "serious" work of fiction in between. Weird, huh? Well, these days I'm reading what I feel like reading. I just finished the non-fiction book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and I'm now on to another work of non-fiction, the very light-hearted and easy to read No Plot No Problem! about how to write a novel in 30 days. Which brings me to my latest plan... taking part in NaNoWriMo 😁
NaNoWriMo is short for "National Novel Writing Month". Some of you might have heard of it or even done it in the past (in which case, please tell me how it was for you!). The goal is to write a novel of 50,000 words in a month. And yes, the novel will most likely be crap -- it's a writing exercise, not a career change. If you're intrigued by this, let me know, I'd love to get a writing group going. As is true for most silly (read "stupid") challenges, they're more fun if you have buddies to share in the pain - and 55 hours of writing in a month will bring pain but hopefully lots of laughs too. I've currently got my eyes on June or July* as potential months seeing that summer holidays are currently out of the question!
Thanks for reading. Stay healthy ❤️
Yours truly,
Alicia
*June because of its 30 days means an average of 1666 words/day. July thanks to its extra day brings the daily average down to 1613. Something to bear in mind 😉