Wednesday 4 November 2026: Hello, November!

4 November 2026 Leave a Comment plan for the month 0 Likes 7 Views

Background image by Andreas from Pixabay

I had intended on joining in with the new Novel November, just to get me back into the writing seat again. But the book I wanted to write was the fifth book, actually Book 4, in the Stevie Beck/Horvale mysteries series.

With four books already written, there were two problems:

I couldn’t remember which characters I’d already used or killed off
I didn’t have a single master character list to work from, just individual character lists, one per book

So even though the plan was to write Book 4 (or the fifth book), I also hadn’t planned it out fully, either on its own or across the series.

This meant that November would have been starting on a back foot already, as I didn’t expect to start writing until I at least had those things set in my head. I also wanted to have a process I could use on my phone or on the tablet in case I was hit by a bolt of inspiration but couldn’t be bothered to boot up the desktop. And that, in turn, meant I lost a lot of time researching a method I could use across devices.

It was while I was reading through Book 1, The Body in the Lake, refreshing my memory but also tweaking it here and there, that I realised it was unlikely I’d get anywhere near 50,000 words written in November, and that would mean already missing a target.

So I rethought the targets instead, trashed the old November schedule, and made a new one.