I’m no stranger to putting a little too much on my plate, and I’m not just talking about at Lao’s Chinese buffet. Mainly because it closed down during the pandemic. Last year, when the time came to do Polyglot NaNoWriMo, it coincided with me moving into my new flat, so I was fighting to find time to write while packing up all of my worldly possessions and moving them into the new place. This year, at the very last minute, I’ve signed up to do a language class. It’s only just started, but I’m having a great time – but I need to be realistic about what I’ve got time to do. Over the past couple of months, as the pandemic has become less of a terrifying monster waiting to snatch you every time you close your front door behind you and more of an abstract concept, lying in wait as we try to piece back together our lives and move on, I’ve tried to scratch together the semblance of a social life while balancing a full time job and language learning – to varying degrees of success. Adding quite an intensive programme to learn a new language and the daily slow burn of Polyglot NaNoWriMo is going to be a challenge, but it’s one I’m not going to shy away from.
Every year that I’ve done this, something has happened that’s stopped me from going the distance and finishing my story, even with the very best of intentions. I know, as I’m the one who is ‘running’ (and I use the word very loosely) this challenge, that I should set a good example – I should be acing it. But as I actually came to think about it, I realised that acing it isn’t the only way to set a good example for this challenge. I saw a lot of people using the hashtag on Twitter (subtle plug for #PolyglotNaNoWriMo) to say that they’d love to take part, but they’re not sure they have it in them. And I’m here to tell you, I’ve been doing this challenge every November since 2018, and I haven’t managed to complete it once. But that’s okay! Even if you only do a couple of days, that’s a couple of days worth of writing and learning new words that you might not otherwise have learned, and something is always better than nothing.
So I’m here, trying one more time – and in a language I’ve never written in before, no less. But I’m ready to get back on that horse and achieve something, and I’m going to be okay with it if I can’t make it all of the way. And I hope you’ll join me!
As always, thank you for reading – if you need any more information on Polyglot NaNoWriMo, I’ve got some other posts on the subject on this blog, under the Polyglot NaNoWriMo tag. Or if you have more specific questions, feel free to reach out either on Twitter or Instagram (I’m @sprakskatan on both). I’ll be happy to help in any way I can. Good luck, and happy writing! I’ll see you next month.
– J.
den språkliga skatan 