It’s that time of year again, folks!

The time of year that most writers set an unbelievably difficult goal for themselves and then work for hours to reach it: National Novel Writing Month.

The last few years, I haven’t participated in the novel writing part of NaNoWriMo. Instead, I’ve used it as motivation to write a specific number of words of poetry. And while that has been an exciting endeavor, a nice change of pace, I’ve found myself wondering if I’ll ever complete another novel. Especially because I feel/have felt that my fantasy novel series has taken a lot more shape in recent years than when I last worked on it.

So, this year, as I’m currently in between having graduated with my M.F.A. and beginning an M.A. in Literature in January, I thought I’d return to my love of writing fiction and actually get something tangible from my fantasy series out on paper.

Right now, my draft is called Penelope and it chronicles the life of Odysseus’s wife in his 20-year absence, showing her side of the story of The Odyssey. I have very little of the plot actually written out, but I’m hoping I can use this novel as a means of setting up the stories in the rest of the series. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do that yet, but that is really what revision is for.

As a means of helping myself through this process, I intend to reread both The Iliad and The Odyssey over the course of the next several months. Not only do I love both of those epics, but I also feel like it will help me get a better understanding of the events of both stories, as well as make note of any locations important to the plot/character’s development. I’ve already been studying maps of ancient Greece, especially the island of Ithaca, where Odysseus is from, to familiarize myself with the names of different cities, provinces, islands, and other landmarks.

Hopefully, this will be a fruitful endeavor that will allow me to set the stage for the rest of my series. At any rate, it’s great to be writing fiction again.