Architect Abroad

A long long time ago, my good friend who introduced me to the concept of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where writers challenge themselves to write 50,000 words of fiction over the month of November. This sums up to 1500 words a day, a really ambitious target to get writers to move those creative juices quickly and eventually produce a book. The challenge celebrates production, not editing, and you are encouraged to just get out of your own way and put those words to paper. Frankly, it’s has some great best seller type success stories including the book Water for Elephants, which became a major motion picture.

When I googled it again I realized that the competition ended in March 2025 with too many challenges/opinions surrounding AI and the creation of content, not enough funding for the not-for-profit, and a variety of other reasons. That really made me kind of sad that I had ‘officially missed it’, although other similar writing challenges had popped up in the meantime. as I always really admired my friend for doing it and had ideally wanted to do it, kind of like ideally wanting to learn piano, but realizing how much work that would go into that. The second thing was I always rememberd about NaNoWriMo a bit too late to really get anything together in time. Like it is October 28th and I was like…oh yeah…NaNoWriMo, that feels like surrendering my November into the abyss of a keyboard with no notice. Also without enough time to ‘Prep-tober’ like how are you supposed to not only write 1500 words a day, but also make some plans for how the plot is going to go. It always, very quickly, felt like things were predicted to fail.

So predictably this year, with about 4 days left of October, I realized NaNoWriMo was around the corner again and I thought maybe this year I could so something interesting with it and adapt this challenge to the format of a blog. Now I am not planning a slow death for anyone with writing 1500 words per blog entry, I would argue that Blogs aren’t meant to be that wordy, but the challenge of producing something daily (or something every other day) is really appealing to me, especially as there is so much content to be created while you are travelling the globe.

So the gauntlet has been laid out, and if you want to join me on this journey, please subscribe to the blog. I don’t want to fill everyone’s social media feeds with endless content, so not all of these will be posted on facebook etc. If you want it, you gotta sign up. I am hoping to write about people, places, parenting, architecture, finances, and include a lot of my own takes into the mix. Cheers and Happy Reading!