I'm writing a novel while I'm on sabbatical! I know it's not nanowrimo yet, but this was the best time for me to take off on sabbatical, so you work with what you've got. My goal is to write a 50K word novel before we get to the end of October. 

I'm a 9-6 startup lifer, working in B2B saas product and product marketing. I started writing as a way to process what was going on around me and how to make sense of the world. 

I hope that a lot of the characters and places that you see in my stories are familiar, since I studied empires at the turn of the 20th century. They hopefully have a grounding in realism, while still allowing new and interesting ideas to shine through. 

Two of the biggest quotes that I try to keep in mind while I'm writing are

 CS Lewis "If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly."

George RR Martin "Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it's not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn't ask the question: What was Aragorn's tax policy?"