I’ve not been feeling great this weekend. Not properly ill, just a little under the weather. I think it’s the combination of shaking off the last of the tiredness from the past few weeks combined with my lack of exercise. With work being so busy last month the regular exercise came to a complete standstill. Considering how long it takes me to get into an exercise routine I now feel like I’m back to square one. I’m back to feeling unfit and lacking the motivation to move my backside and rectify that. Yet I know how much better I will feel if I just get on with it.

So I have to do it. This week. Back to Body Balance. Back to working out at home. And in a week or two back to Spinning as well (one step at a time, I need to motivate myself before I kill myself with exercise!)

Both exercise and writing need to be staple parts of my routine once again because in a couple of weeks it will be November. And November is NaNoWriMo. That’s National Novel Writing Month. I will be trying to write 50,000 words in one month. To be honest I’m not thinking about the reality of it too much. My plan is that every spare minute between work, sleep and exercising will be spent writing. I do have a weekend in London planned. But that is three hours on a train each way. Plenty of writing time even then.

For me the aim of NaNoWriMo is to get past the mental block I have about writing fiction. As with blogging I just need to do it and as I do I am sure I will find my voice. I am not expecting 50,000 words of fabulousness at the end of the month. 50,000 words with the potential to be fabulous after copious amounts of editing would be a great achievement.

First I need to decide what I am going to write. I have two ideas which already have outlines and a certain level of character development. I have a further two with nothing much done so far. For a while I thought I might just dive into something new and see what happens. But if what happens is writers block I have nothing to push me on. No cues to get me writing again. That could be fatal and mean I stop before I’ve even started. So it’s down to the two ideas with outlines, characters and some initial efforts to get them down onto paper.

Sooo… which one do I pick? I’ve written a synopsis of both and sent them to a few friends for their opinion. It took me a good couple of minutes of hovering over the send button before I let the email go. The friends I’ve sent it too are mostly bookworms. One has already written a couple of scripts which I really enjoyed. Another sells books for a living and has probably seen thousands of synopsis better than my attempts. Two I’m in a book club with and together we’ve pulled apart novels that other people have poured their heart and soul in to writing. I’m petrified that someone will reply with the email equivalent of incessant laughter at the thought of me writing a novel. It isn’t that my friends are cruel. It is that I am feeling quite insecure.

If nothing else I’m hoping NaNoWriMo will boost my confidence about writing fiction. Whatever I write is never going to be liked by everyone so I need to learn how to be confident about my writing. I will have to learn how to differentiate between helpful feedback and negative criticism. And work out which are the people I know who will read my work as it develops and give me an honest and useful response.

I am scared that whatever I do write might be completely wrong. I might get to the end of the month and discover I can’t write fiction at all. But this is precisely why I need NaNoWriMo. To push me out of my comfort zone and see exactly what I’m made of!