Over the years, the word NaNoWriMo has come up many times for me, but all I really knew about it was that people who did it had to write an entire novel in a month.

WTF!?

Not gonna work for me, I thought. My last book took 10 years and more than 11 drafts. And, anyway, the last time I wrote fiction was in my 20s, which felt like a lifetime ago. Sure, it had been a big dream of mine when I was a teenager, and I’d even written a full-length novel, but I had different priorities now. I had client sessions booked. I also had a second non-fiction book to write that I’d already started. It didn’t make any sense to put that project on hold to do this one. It felt like a preposterous idea.

But it kept showing up, anyway.

And I kept ignoring it.

A week before the starting date, someone posted in a Facebook group that they were doing it, and it felt like an alarm going off.

Dammit, I thought. I should do it. I’m going to do it. I’ve wanted to do it for years. Why not?

But I still didn’t sign up.

Three days before the starting date someone else posted about it on Facebook. And then I read an article about something else entirely, and there it was again, in the article.

I know what signs from my True Self look and feel like, but that doesn’t mean I feel any less fear and resistance as anyone else. The signs were there, loud and clear. And I knew very well they were showing up in response to my daily intentions and visualizations of my books uplifting consciousness around the world. I was getting exactly what I asked for.

Well, if your books are going to uplift consciousness, my True Self was saying, then you’re damn well going to have to write them first, aren’t you? And even if this isn’t THE book, you can use this opportunity to build a daily schedule that includes writing a shit-ton of words, because you keep telling me about all these books you want to write, and I don’t see you writing them.

And that’s the thing.

A lot of us are sitting around doing our intentions, visualizations, affirmations, hocus pocus whatever, and it’s working. Things start shifting and happening around us to guide us in that direction. We get repetitive signs and synchronicities that tell us:

Yes! This! Get your ass in gear! Follow up on this!

But we’re scared of the changes and challenges they’ll bring. We’re scared we’ll fail at that thing we care most about, that secret dream buried within a safer dream that we don’t tell anyone about. So we lie and tell ourselves these are just weird coincidences that don’t mean anything, so we won’t have to take action on them.

Then our True Self shrugs, because we have the free will to do the same-old same-old if we choose, and that doorway of opportunity closes.

I almost did that myself, even though I know better.

Two days before NaNoWriMo started, I realized that, if I was going to do this thing, I’d need a book idea and rough outline pronto.

I made a plan to go to one of my favourite cafes in the city—Crema in the Junction—where I could make this happen while sipping on creamy cortados. If I came up with a half do-able outline, I decided, I would sign up that night. If not, then I wouldn’t.

Next, I remembered to take the advice I repeatedly give to all my clients—set a clear intention.

I wrote down that I was going to the cafe with the intention of creating a 3-part outline for my novel, the inciting incident, the middle build, and the final payoff—a structure I learned from author Steven Pressfield’s blog.

Then I sat and visualized the book being completely finished, with a powerfully transformative storyline, along me feeling happy and proud of it.

The next day when I woke up there was an idea in my head, which was to dig out an idea for a metaphysical novel I’d scribbled down a few months back when I was taking a break between other things. I didn’t even know if I still had it, but when I looked, there it was, at the bottom of a pile of notebooks. It was just the seed of an idea, but it was based in a world I know a lot about—the spiritual world—and I felt excited about playing around with that in a fiction environment.

I caught a streetcar to the cafe, where, fortified with cookies and cortados, I turned my journal to a new, blank page and wrote: “So what is this book about?” at the top of my page. Under that, I began freewriting whatever popped into my head. Most of it was meaningless. But eventually I began getting some fun ideas, and the next thing I knew I’d filled around 20 pages of my journal. I had my mini-outline.

Still, when I got home and opened up the NaNoWriMo website, I froze. Ninety percent of me was like “No way. We can’t do this.”

I knew the problem was fear, so I had a gentle talk with my primary/child self, where I reminded her that we were just doing this to create a daily ritual around writing, and that anything we managed to get down was more than we had right now, so it would be impossible for us to fail. And I promised her that no matter what happened, it would only lead to us celebrating. I would not be putting her down for not getting this thing perfect, which was her biggest fear.

It’s everyone’s biggest fear: What if I fuck up? What if I can’t do it? What if I fail?

But that’s not an actual problem. The official term for that is “learning”.  The real fear is that you’ll hate yourself if it doesn’t all happen perfectly, immediately, and, if you so choose, you can learn to control that.

Success is a stupid word made up by some old white guy in a boardroom in 1852. Who cares? It’s a feeling of celebration that we want. That we’re okay. That we’re enough. And we can give that to ourselves.

Or that’s what I told my primary/child self. Being kind and gentle with myself is a fairly new thing for me.

Now I’m 11 days in, and I’ve written 19,377 words, and, while the copy is rough, I’m feeling pretty damn excited about what I’ve got so far. Ideas keep showing up, the outline keeps getting more detailed, and my characters are coming to life in such a way that they’re starting to take the story in directions I wasn’t expecting. It’s feeling like I’ve been invited along on their journey, and I’m just writing about it, which is weird because one of the characters is based on me.

But it’s still hard work. And I’m not loving that. Resistance from my primary/child self is kicking my ass every day.

It whispers in my ear nonstop:

We should take a break. We should work on our website. We should go get a chocolate bar from the convenience store. We should check our email. We should give up now. This is too hard. I don’t want to do this anymore. I need a nap. I have a headache. I’m on my period. I just want to curl up and watch House Hunters on TV.

And that’s the thing you need to know about intuition. It can guide you to where you most want to go, but it can’t do the work for you. It can’t make you follow up on those signs. It can’t make you take action when the fear of change, challenge and possible failure sets off your primitive brain’s alarm systems–which are solely focused on keeping you stuck doing the same-old same-old.

Your True Self can only send you signs and possible doorways to walk through.

But you have to take a deep breath, stand up and walk through those doors. And keep walking. And walking. And walking.

So that’s what I’m doing, and slowly I’m learning how to create a daily writing ritual that doesn’t take up my entire day. I’m also learning how to find sneaky ways around that voice of resistance (using this free timer helps; bribery does too).

Will I end up with a bestselling novel? Who the hell knows. I’m certainly visualizing that. But I also understand that the whole purpose of big dreams and goals is to generate fun, yet challenging experiences that allow us to expand and grow who we ARE and what we’re capable of doing.

That’s where the real gold shows up in our lives.

Rise up and shine as your True Self,

Shawn xo

P.S. If you’re thinking, “Wait! What is this novel about?” Here’s the rough summary.

It’s about a soul traveller named Jill who needs to graduate from Earth to join her soul family on Earth 2. She has already had 235 lives and while she keeps learning and growing she always falls under the spell of the Old Earth Energy dominated by False Self survival-based consciousness once she lands on Earth. When she gets murdered yet again, she sees a sign in a spiritual corridor that says “You get what you have the courage to ask for.” And this gives her an idea: to ask the Council of Elders for a shortcut. Why the hell not. She’s suffered enough, she figures. Surely they’ll see her reasoning. They give her one, but it’s still not a sure thing. And the catch is that she has to teach it to as many other people as possible before she dies again.

P.P. S. I’d love to read your thoughts or questions about this or any other post in the comments below or on my Facebook page. What signs are you receiving? What actions are you taking (or planning to take now that you’ve read this!) :)

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