What you CAN do in November!
November is never exactly fun, and this year we have a second lockdown to make it hardly worth the 30 days on a calendar. My writing room calendar has a rather weary-looking unicorn making its slow way through the stars, and I feel much the same myself.
Seems the best method of escape this month is through the pages of a book, which can whisk you through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia, out to the stars, back in time to ancient Rome, into the future, or into someone else's head. In a book, you can be a hero or a heroine, ride a horse over the mountains, fly on a dragon's back, win all your battles, and eat cake even if all the cafes are shut.
And if - the unicorn forbid - you run out of books to read, why not write your own? Because, with perfect timing for lockdown-take-two, it's National Novel Writing Month! Or, for those in the know, NaNoWriMo.
National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel during the thirty days of November, and it's grown in popularity ever since. Even if you've never written a book before, the NaNoWriMo writing community can inspire and help you to do so. There's a young writers programme, too. And if you're a seasoned novelist, it might help you put your magical words on the page instead of wasting them on social media posts like this one. (Sorry, Unicorn... I promise I'll sign up immediately!)