It’s November 2017 at 5:00 a.m., and I’m sitting in the dark, on the couch with my laptop balanced on my knees. I wrote 1,667 words every day that month and technically “won” NaNoWriMo.
Then I didn’t touch that draft for 11 months.
In this solo episode, I share why I stopped recommending intense writing challenges years before NaNoWriMo shut down — especially for women and anyone prone to pushing too hard. I talk about what that month really cost me, the start-stop-guilt pattern I see in so many writers (and on Substack), and the moment a simple graph changed how I write.
If your Substack has gone silent, or you keep circling a book, this one’s for you.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
The quick history of NaNoWriMo, including how only 6 of the original 21 writers hit 50,000 words
Why the draft that became Unfussy Life took almost five years to publish (and how 30,000 of those words didn’t make it)
What I saw when I ran intense writing challenges inside my community from 2018 to 2021
The all-or-nothing pattern behind the burst-of-posts-then-silence Substack, and why coming back doesn’t have to be hard
How seeing two hormone graphs side by side reshaped my writing practice
What 13 years of corporate push taught me about masculine and feminine energy, and why we need both
The four moon phases, simplified for your writing: plant, draft, publish, refine
Why Writing with the Moon was the easiest book I’ve ever written
A map of this November’s moon cycle, from the new moon in Scorpio on November 9 to the dark moon on December 7
An invitation to Finding Flow: Breathe New Life into Your Substack
Links
Some of these links may be affiliate links. If you click and make a purchase, I earn a commission.
Finding Flow: Breathe New Life into Your Substack — 29 days, new moon to new moon, November 9 – December 7. A daily voice memo and prompt, live 90-minute Monday calls at 1:00 pm ET (recorded), integration week over Thanksgiving, and a free copy of Writing with the Moon. $97. Join here.
Read the companion essay, “The Ultimate NaNoWriMo Alternative,” on Energy-First Writing
Connect with Jacqueline Fisch:
Sign up for Finding Flow: live 29-day writing experience beginning on November 9
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Jacqueline Fisch: [00:00:00] It's November 2017, and I'm sitting on my couch in the dark, 5:00 AM, popped open my laptop. I have a spreadsheet open with a daily word count tracker, and a little bit of, probably a lot of excitement, and an also a lot of, "What am I actually doing? Can I do this? What will this be?" And I was planning to write a book in 30 days, 1,667 words a day every single day of November, no excuses.
And I did it. November 30th, I wrote every day. I hit 50,000 words, and technically, I air quote "won". I thought I would pick up that draft of the book on December 1st, edit it, and [00:01:00] then turn it around maybe a couple weeks after that and get a book out into the world, a full-length book And then I didn't touch that draft for 11 months, completely ignored it.
And that is what I'm talking to you about today. Welcome to How Women Write. I'm Jacqueline Fish, the founder of the Intuitive Writing School, and depending on when you're listening to this, I'm recording this on Tuesday, November 3rd If you're listening in early November, there's a good chance you've felt the pull.
You want to write more this month. Maybe it's the book you keep thinking about, the book you started and want to come back to, the blog you want to start, the business, or maybe it's your Substack, something you started strong, you've sent a couple posts, and then it went silent. So maybe you're asking ChatGPT or Claude or Google [00:02:00] and saying, "What's a writing challenge I could do this month?
How do I get back into writing?" And one of those answers might be NaNoWriMo. First spoiler, NaNoWriMo doesn't exist anymore. It stands for National Novel Writing Month. I think it's been a few years since they've been around. It was a free or a not-for-profit writing challenge where you write 50,000 words in 30 days, and that is what I used to draft that book that sat there.
I'll come back to what happened to that after. Second spoiler, I stopped recommending challenges like NaNoWriMo of the intense variety years before it went away, especially for women and especially for anyone who's prone to burnout or pushing too hard or has a tendency to be extra hard on themselves.
And I'm gonna tell you why and what I suggest instead, because I still write a lot. [00:03:00] I don't need a writing challenge to do that anymore. I don't write that way anymore. Little backstory, in case you've never done it or have never heard of NaNoWriMo. It started in July 1999. A writer named Chris Baty, I think that's how you say his last name, from San Francisco gathered 21 friends and told them all, "Let's write 50,000 words in a month."
So this was July. Six of them made it. Six out of 21. Think about that. That is such a small fraction of who did it. And the next year, they moved that writing challenge to November. Their thinking was that they wanted to take advantage of miserable weather, which I'm laughing, not a thing now that I live in Florida.
I've been here for five years. The weather is not miserable in November. It is delightful. However, I grew up up north. I get it. And we just changed clocks here [00:04:00] in the US, and it's dark probably 6:00, maybe even earlier if you're up north. It's cold. It's damp. It's dark, so why not stay inside and write? I, for one, am a huge fan of sipping something cozy, sitting under a blanket on the couch or on my porch and writing, really sinking into a writing project.
Day after day, but not necessarily the same energy every day. I'll come back to that. So back to this miserable weather thing in November. NaNoWriMo actually grew into a pretty big nonprofit, and actually supported more than a million writers over the years. So I can imagine tons of books were born this way, and I get the heart of it.
Stories matter, creativities- creativity matters, showing up for your writing and your habits absolutely does. And writers [00:05:00] started canceling their accounts. The organization made some stances that sounded like they were big fans of generative AI, so could you generate 50,000 words in 30 days? Very easily if you're using gen AI to do that.
There were some other things going on in there, I'm not gonna go into all the details, but eventually it shut down, which is not really the focus of what I wanna talk about today. My point is what that kind of writing challenge does to us. So that first trip with NaNoWriMo, my first time in 2017, that later became Unfussy Life, and I published that in 2021.
You guys, that was almost five years later. It took me years to figure out what the heck it was I wrote. Of those 50,000 words, I removed 30 And the final word count of that book was around 68, 70,000 [00:06:00] words. So essentially, I rewrote almost the whole thing. So I used NaNoWriMo again to draft Intuitive Writing, what became Intuitive Writing.
That book came out in 2023, and I was never a fan of using it to write novels. It was just not what I wanted. I wrote nonfiction. I would use it to write a blog series, rewrite some website copy, newsletters, social posts, whatever my business needed, and some creative things in there too. And that's honestly what most of the writers I work with want too.
Not all of them want to write a novel. In fact, most of them don't. Most of them just want to write, whether it's to start writing again because they had a love for it and they moved away from it, or they want to enjoy writing for the first time. There's something in them that really wants to write. And here's the thing that I didn't [00:07:00] realize at the time, at the end of this 30 days.
So while I could point to at the time, "Oh, I was busy, my business was super full, I was focused on growing the business, I didn't have time to work on my book," I was actually burnt out. I was tired. Now, I am someone people often ask me, "How do you do it all? How do you do so many things? How do you blog consistently?"
I naturally have a lot of energy. If you are into human design, I'm a two-five generator. I have a strong battery that can go when I'm excited and when I'm lit up.
But after a month of over 1,600 words a day, on top of a full client load, on top of my keeping my blog regular, on top of newsletters, all that, feeding my family, they were younger then, driving my kids all the places, I needed a month off before I could even look at the draft. [00:08:00] And then that month, like I mentioned, turned into 11 twice.
It actually happened again. So 2018, I went back to edit that initial draft, and I used a November to do that. I went through it and just went through the writing that I wrote, fixed typos, spiffed things up, finished sentences, and I still didn't know what it was. So that draft needed a lot, a lot of work I rewrote it at least a couple times.
And working with the authors that I mentor, this is totally normal. I see a good number of them rewrite their first drafts. And when you cram 50,000 words into 30 days, a lot of what you write just isn't usable. This isn't bad, but there's a new way I write so that doesn't happen anymore.
I think these writing challenges reward quantity, not quality, and it is [00:09:00] absolutely not sustainable, for me especially. Clearly it wasn't. I did 30 days of writing every day, and then I stopped, and that's not the goal, and I'm sure that's not the goal for you either. You don't want to start writing for 30 days and then stop writing for a year.
You want to write regularly, consistently, whatever consistently means for you. That could mean three times a week. That could mean two weeks out of the month. Whatever that is, it is unique to you, but it is sustainable, something that you can do for the long term, and not just for the long term, but enjoy it.
Sure, NaNoWriMo did help me draft two books, and it delivered the lessons I needed, and it also made those books take way longer than they needed to. And I saw not just myself burn out, but I saw others. So from 2018 to 2021, I ran a NaNoWriMo style month inside the [00:10:00] studio. I changed the rules. I invited everyone to use whatever rules they wanted, pick your own word count, skip the word count completely, and just pick a writing streak, like write for 15 days out of 30.
Write whatever you want, or just write or journal whatever it is. And what I saw every time was it burned most people out. The ones that didn't burn out were the ones who already had a consistent writing habit. So for them, the challenge wasn't really ... it was a probably a momentum booster for them, but they were already in the habit of writing.
It was just dialing it up. But if you go from zero, like not writing, to writing every day for 30 days, it can be a lot. So I watched writers quit halfway through. I saw some never start. I saw some writing in sporadic bursts and then never build the habit they wanted. I saw some [00:11:00] start on day six, go to day 11- Miss two weeks and just chalk it up to, "Oh, I'm not cut out for this.
I don't have time. I can't write. I'm not gonna do this." Does this sound familiar? This is exactly what happens to so many people, and because I'm writing on Substack now, I see that there as well. A burst of posts, then silence. And what follows the silence almost every time is guilt. People feel bad because they're not publishing.
They feel bad because they missed a week, then two, then three, then it's three or four months go by and they're like, "Crap, I haven't published." And they're not sure, how do I come back? Do I announce my return? The thing is, the longer you wait, the harder it is to come back. It just feels heavier. Now, I don't think it needs to be harder.
I think you can honestly jump back in. You can finish listening to this episode and publish something today, no [00:12:00] overthinking required. And just know that this kind of all or nothing thinking is so common. So if this is your story, you've started and stopped a writing habit, whether it's Substack or a newsletter or a blog or social posts, and you've started and stopped more times than you can count, it's not your fault.
This extreme push, push energy, go, go, go, it's not for everyone, and it's absolutely not what is required to build a body of work and a life, a writing life, that works in rhythms and cycles like we do. Here's where everything changed for me
Around 2020, a naturopathic doctor friend of mine showed me two graphs. One was the male hormone cycle, and one was the female hormone cycle. She didn't need to say a word. I saw the picture. Picture's worth a thousand words, [00:13:00] right? It clicked instantly. Here's the thing, male hormones run on roughly a 24-hour cycle, just like the sun, same energy every single day, day after day.
And like the sun, predictable, consistent. Female cycles, though, are different and move over around 28 days or so, just like the moon moves through its cycle in roughly 29 and a half days. Not a coincidence. So if you've tried a writing challenge in the past or any kind of challenge, I know a lot of people are doing the yapping challenge now, which I don't know anything about it other than I think you turn on Instagram and talk.
I'm doing something similar, but not associated with that. That's all I know about it. Maybe you noticed that some days the words pour out, even if you're doing a talking challenge, and one day you start to talk and you can't form a sentence, and the words feel clunky. Just like [00:14:00] writing, some days the words pour out, other days you feel like you can't lift a pen.
It's not you, and what often happens is people think, "I was so great at writing the other week. It was just flowing. It felt so good, and this week I can't. What is wrong with me?" There is nothing wrong with you. It's normal. You changed. You had a different rhythm. Your hormones changed. The moon changed.
While we don't blame things on the moon or our hormones, we can look to them and work with them. You might even have some days where you want to burn the whole manuscript down and start over. Maybe you've already done that, and some days in the month, you simply need to get quiet, sit under a blankie, sip some tea, and read a book.
You don't know what you wanna say, and then what happens is people can beat themselves up about it, like, "Oh, I'm not writing. I feel so bad." So [00:15:00] people wonder, "Why can't I be that fast, flowy writer every single day of the month?" We're not built that way. So here's what I learned the hard way, and why I will talk about this until the end of days.
Most of my corporate career, 13 years in management consulting, crisis communications, I was fueled by masculine energy. I was good at that. I s- was surrounded by men. I saw how they got ahead, and I did what they did: push, produce, climb the ladder, rinse, repeat. Doesn't matter how tired you are. Like, I remember being pregnant, maybe six or seven months pregnant, and working on a huge proposal, late nights at the office, coming home only to eat dinner, and then get back online to work on these things some more.
Working till midnight some nights. I pushed and pushed, and it worked for [00:16:00] me. I climbed the ladder, till it didn't. I was also laid off three times, so maybe I could say it didn't work at all. And until I had kids, that part of me actually changed When I returned to work after having kids, I felt different.
I didn't know exactly what it was, but I think it was I was really stepping more into my feminine energy. And this is not masculine versus feminine. It is not one is better. We need both energies. We need action, and we need surrender, and we need structure, and we need flow, and we need intuition, and we need practical thinking.
We need all of it. So a writing practice that only pushes, only follows action, structure, planning, and left brain thinking is missing half of what makes the writing flow. And you've probably felt it when you're writing along, you lose track of time, [00:17:00] you are just in the zone. You're in flow. It feels good.
Athletes describe this a lot. They're not thinking during their game when they're playing. They are fully present and in it, and that is how I write, and that's how I teach writing. So here's the short version of writing with the moon or writing with nature's rhythms. Here's what it actually looks like.
If you have a menstrual cycle and that feels like a stronger pull, start with your own energy. If you don't have a cycle, whether you never had one to begin with or you don't have one anymore, and you want something steady to follow, use the moon. I love it because it's there, reliable, and consistent. Four phases, and I'll keep this simple as it applies to your writing.
New moon phase, we have a new moon coming up on November ninth. Think winter, rest, going inward, journaling. [00:18:00] This is where we plant seeds in the dark soil. Ask yourself, "What do I want to create this cycle, this whole moon cycle over the next twenty-nine or so days? What am I letting go of?" Then we have the waxing moon.
This is the energy of spring. The energy is building. We have all the ideas. Some might call this squirrel brain or shiny object time. We can work with this in a way that serves our writing practice instead of saying, "I have so many ideas, I can't pick one," or, "I can't focus because there's so many things I could be doing."
We use that. So this is where the energy is building, great time for brainstorming, outlining, writing fast drafts, great time to write a bunch of drafts and bank a few posts to edit and publish later. You don't have to publish everything. Next, we have the full moon.
This is the energy of summer, full visibility, like ovulation. [00:19:00] Do your deepest writing session. We always have a three-hour writing block inside the studio around the full moon. This might be when you share your writing, hit publish, announce your project. This is magnetic time. This is time to be out there, and you might notice just things come to you more easily.
You might notice that you speak more eloquently, freely. Your brain is on. Like, you are on. And then there's the waning moon. This is the energy of fall. It's time to slow down, edit. You might catch typos you've missed 10 times, revisit old essays.
You might refresh them, repurpose them, share them in a new way. And those four phases, that's it. That's the bones of it. It is so simple. I wrote my last book, Writing With the Moon, published in May 2026, I wrote it this way. I tested this material as I developed it [00:20:00] over two years. So
Yes, that book took two years to write, but I was testing the material as I went. And honestly, it was the easiest book I've ever written. Most days when I was focused on it, the words just poured out. I hit my writing goal in under an hour. I wasn't aiming for word count, I was aiming to write a certain section at a time.
I don't even think I counted words, actually. And I did it alongside my community while still coaching writers, still teaching, still publishing my blog and my Substack and this podcast every week, and homeschooling my teenagers. These were the moments I thought, 'Wow, th- like, this is too easy.
Am I doing something wrong?' I can't believe I actually thought that. I'm laughing at myself. If you are thinking that, then you are doing it right. So that's also not to say that writing is always easy. There are challenging aspects. There are parts where you're telling certain stories that feel so uncomfortable to [00:21:00] say out loud, things where you're digging and changing and editing and rearranging, which by the way, editing is not writing.
It's quite a different energy. I'll get to that another time.
That's a whole other ballgame. But really, this is how writing is supposed to feel all along. Here's what's interesting about November this year, 2026. We don't start on November 1st, maybe you did start a writing challenge on Sunday, November 1st, and maybe you're plugging along. Or maybe you were supposed to start and you're staring at an empty tracker thinking, "Yeah, I can't do this.
This is too hard," or, "I just don't want to." We start on the new moon. November 9th is the new moon in Scorpio. Scorpio's themes are about death and rebirth, letting what's done be done and fall away so that something new can grow and emerge. So if your Substack has gone silent or you want to begin a Substack, [00:22:00] this is a wonderful time to begin it.
Here's a question to answer. What is my Substack really here to do? What am I ready to release? What do I wanna let go of? What do I wanna share with the world? Mid-November, we have the waxing moon, and this is when the sun moves into Sagittarius. Sagittarius is fire, like wildfire. The teacher, the truth teller.
Big ideas bigger than you can think. This is a great time to write fast and bank our posts. Really create a rhythm that fits your life. Your actual life, not the one ... your aspirational one that you wish you had. Today's life. Then November 24th, we have the full moon in Gemini. Gemini rules communication.
This is a wonderful time to publish, announce. Maybe your first post will go out on this date, or [00:23:00] you will announce your big writing project, or you'll be in your groove by then. Great time to hit send on things. Then the waning moon lands on Thanksgiving week here in the US. Great time to rest, do some light revisions, repurpose some things, sit with what you've written, and look it all over.
Holidays are part of life. Family is part of life. And it's not here to stretch you extra thin or make you feel guilty for the work you're not doing. It's just part of the rhythm. And then on December 7th-
We have the dark moon right before the next new moon. That happens on December 8th. This is when we finish, tie up loose ends, and get ready to go inward for the next cycle. So we're not doing word counts, gold stars, no leaderboard, no seeing who's in first place, who did the most writing. I used to do this kind of thing, and [00:24:00] it doesn't work.
It- or I should say it works for a short while, but then it burns people out. So with that rhythm, you show up, you just do the writing that you're here to do, and I say this all the time, if you are stuck, one honest sentence at a time, then another, then another. I created what I wish I had when I was burning out on NaNoWriMo or when I didn't know any better.
It's called Finding Flow. I've run this experience several times over the years, and this year I decided to make it specific to Substack. We are going to breathe new life into your Substack, whether it is brand-new life that we're sparking or you are bringing something back to life Perfect energy for Scorpio season to begin.
This is intentionally not a challenge. It's an experience. 29 days from [00:25:00] new moon to new moon, one moon cycle, November 9th through December 7th. Every day you'll get a short voice memo from me with a writing prompt and a little guidance, like just a tiny nugget, two to five minutes, just to keep you going and give you direction.
I've heard from many people in the past who have done this that daily message was so grounding for each day. So I do send this in the morning, and then on Mondays we will meet live for 90 minutes starting at 1:00 Eastern Time. These are recorded if you can't make it. It's a little bit of lesson and writing time and time for Q&A.
So the time to write is built in. It is not, "Here's a bunch of learning to go do, now go write on your own time." Yes, you will write on your own time, but I find doing it with others at the same time is so useful. There's no call Thanksgiving week, so no worries about falling behind, just the extra space [00:26:00] to focus and do whatever it is you want to do.
So together we will clear the clutter, clear the brain fog. Also, Mercury is retrograde at the moment and goes direct on November 13th, along with Venus. Venus is also retrograde, so we'll have two planets going direct just a couple of days after we begin. I love this energy.
I actually decided kind of last minute to run this experience. I don't know if I've run it at all this year. If I did, it was January, and I used to do it a couple times a year. So I don't know when I'm gonna do this again. It's when the energy is right and I really feel a strong pull.
After running a version of this live several times, people write more than they have in months. They often write more than they thought they would, and even the words that come through surprise them, in a good way. They look back over the writing, and they're [00:27:00] like, "Wow, this is actually pretty good." And the habit lasts.
Here's the most important part. I've watched people join Finding Flow, and then they keep going. They keep publishing for years, no matter what the rhythm looks like. Even if a rhythm looks like they publish three times one month, one the next, they are still going. The other thing I see with people doing this, especially on Substack, is that a book is often inside their Substack, whether they know it or not yet.
Some actually set out to write a Substack knowing that it's going to become a book later, or they know they have a book in them, but they aren't exactly sure, and what they do is start a Substack or a blog. Swap out blog for Substack if you want. So the invitation to join Finding Flow is open. It's only $97.
The link is in the show notes. And honestly, I think about the kind of writing I used to [00:28:00] do in the dark at 5:00 AM, in 2017, a lot. I lived in Illinois at the time. I think of that laptop, the dark, except for the light from my salt lamp. I don't regret it. Those times, those early mornings really did teach me something, and now I know that I don't have to write like that.
If I want to write in the dark at 5:00 AM, I totally can, but I don't have to do it every day, every single day, and then land in burnout. You don't have to do this either. So if this episode sparked something in you, send it to a writer friend whose writing has maybe gotten a little stale and they need a little revival.
And if you want to write with me this November, I would love to see you inside Finding Flow. You can find it at theintuitivewritingschool.com, and I will see you on the [00:29:00] new moon.
