I’ve known about the NaNoWriMo concept for a long time and I never thought it would be for me. I plan to retire from my day job in a few years, while I’m still young enough to do something else. Whether that day comes in a November or not, I plan to write so frequently that NaNoWriMo will be unnecessary. Basically, I plan to make writing my fulltime job five days a week. If I’m not writing that frequently, I think I would call the attempt a failure and do something else or return to my old job.
At the end of October 2025 I was invited to participate in the dry run for “Amethyst: The Liberated Fiction Challenge“. As a test engineer, they had me at ‘dry run’. The linked Substack post explains how it’s different from NaNoWriMo (and could easily lead you down the rabbit hole of ‘what the heck happened to NaNoWriMo’). With only a week to prepare, I decided to jump in and see if I could do it.
Let me say up front that I’m very grateful to the Amethyst organizers for the invitation, guidance, encouragement, and mutual support during the challenge. They hosted virtual write-ins and kept us going. I also enjoyed the on-line company of the other writers in the group and enjoyed reading snippets of their work (and sorry for not posting more of my own snippets).
Despite the short notice, the timing was pretty good. As a military contractor, I still had a fulltime job, but the government was ‘shut down’. That doesn’t mean I was wasting taxpayer money like the government civilians that didn’t work and still got paid (late). It did mean that my usual, hectic work pace and travel schedule was greatly relaxed. After months of moving, setting up house, and adjusting to new work and family circumstance, my social and family calendar was also fairly light. I further hedged my bets by scheduling five days of vacation leading up to Thanksgiving to make sure I had time to catch up if I fell behind.
And I’m happy to say, I did not write an entire novel in a month. I did, however, write 50,000 words of a novel, which is the actual goal (in the case of Amethyst, 50,000 words of new fiction, not restricted to one work). I think I have at least 10,000 words to go on my novel’s first draft, which will still be pretty ‘light on the ground’ as they say. I definitely have a lot of rewriting to do and spots where I know I need to add scenes and descriptions, especially in the first act. I think if I had finished the thing around the 50,000 word mark I’d be questioning if I had wasted my time on the wrong idea. Right now, I feel good about what I’ve written and I’m excited to finish it and then polish it.
I have a lot of potential ideas for short stories, novels, series, etc. I pull those out and look at them, add to them, noodle on them, and make promises to myself the I’m going to write most of these when I retire from the day job. The short story ideas I actually finish sometimes as that has been my primary writing focus for the last four years. It’s what I can manage with a fulltime job and a family.
I did start a novel a few years ago, but it was a pet project that I wasn’t entirely serious about. It was something I wrote purely for fun. So, when it stopped being fun I stopped writing it (at around 35,000 words). It wasn’t really ‘struggling’ as much as ‘questioning’ if it was something I even wanted to finish. I’ve been wanting to go back to it most of this year when I’ve been too busy and stressed to do so. After this Amethyst experience, I’m even more interested in going back to it, but not until I finish the current book.
Every experience has lessons to teach and Amethyst is the kind of challenge you take on because you want to learn something about yourself. One thing I knew about myself but didn’t really factor in was how goal obsessed I can be. When I set a goal for myself, I’m really invested in hitting the mark. The daily word count quickly became a fun challenge-reward system and propelled my writing and the habit. I built a spreadsheet to track my completion rate, how far ahead or behind the total goal I was, and my percentage to the 50,000 word goal.
What surprised me was how much easier hitting the daily goal was towards the end than it had been at the beginning. I often write 2,000 or more words on a Saturday or Sunday and I’ve written over 5,000 in one day when I was really inspired. Sometimes it’s hard to write anything on the weekend and sometimes I’m really productive. When I write every day, I found that it’s always easier to write than when I’m starting at a stand still. I only struggled once or twice and mostly those were life getting in the way, not ‘writer’s block’. This is probably not a ground breaking discovery–in fact, this is probably the central thesis of the project. I thought I knew my own writing habits and capacity better and didn’t think it would have as big an affect on me.
I also learned that I want to have a stronger outline before I start my next effort. I like discovery writing and sometimes I write short stories in that mode. I started this novel-writing month with an idea and a world that had a lot of meat on the bones, a project I’ve been noodling on longer than anything else in my files. I wrote an outline and chose major plot points from beginning to end (this site was very helpful in that effort), but it was a sketch and I intended to leave a lot of room for discovery. That worked, sometimes, but I now see how a more thorough outline would have helped. Several times I stopped and reworked or expanded the next section of the outline and that slowed me down. Where the outline was solid, I had no difficulty adding scenes and changing things, even major plot points. When I have a few notes jotted down for a scene or a cursory idea of what a scene should be I can jump right in. So, I don’t feel I need to leave as much room for discovery as I thought because I now know that I am unlikely to overly restrain myself.
These were good lessons and I’m glad I learned them. I’m glad I took up the challenge and finished the 50,000 words and it gave me more confidence in my plan for a second career as an independent writer. I love writing every day and I’m going to miss being able to do so until that day comes.
Or February 2026. That when the first ‘wet’ run of Amethyst is planned. I haven’t decided if I’m going to do it again so soon (but I do have ideas for the second book…). If I do, I’ll post about it here.
Arthur P. Dutton 