One problem I see on occasion from works including unrequited love is a failure to really keep the plot from melting together, so a relationship that's meant to to come about later and is currently unrequited (or may not even be intended to reach fruition in any meaningful way) is still treated as being canon for all intents and purposes. Sometimes it's in the form of the story treating it as a betrayal if one of the non-partners hangs out with someone else, other times it's just a general way of portraying the relationship that makes it feel like they're supposed to be a couple even if they're not actually one. It's one thing if the characters feel a certain way, and relationships come in many forms, but it can be a real issue when a relationship comes across as unhealthy and the author seems to be tipping the scales.

Of note, the core weirdness isn't necessarily romance related or even intrinsically bad. The fact that some beats are effectively foregone conclusions is usually a fairly banal writing trope, Plot Armor and the Unspoken Plan Guarantee are tropes that have basically become part of the common lexicon by now. It's when it starts to monkey up the timeline of the story that it becomes a problem, when the story starts acting like characters already know things or have already done things that haven't happened yet. When romance is involved, it also carries some rather Unfortunate Implications by reinforcing a cultural problem of people feeling like they have some sort of claim on others because they're attracted to them, even if the other person never agreed to any sort of relationship or even fully rejected them...

All that's certainly not to say unrequited love is a bad plot beat, but that this is one trap to watch out for when trying to write it, especially given how heated people can get about romance.

We'd set out on our journey with modest hopes. Make some deliveries, do a bit of trading, maybe explore some under-examined parts of The Void. This mission wasn't meant to be a grand, ambitious quest, it was a glorified road trip with some side hustles along the way... But apparently, that was still a bit too close to the sun for the IVC Icarus, because we were caught up in a Void storm and were left adrift.

I didn't even know if the rest of the crew was still alive. We'd been stuck in separate chambers when the hull was breached, and the life support rune matrix had given out two hours ago. However, just as the air was starting to get thin in the room I'd been stuck in, a knocking came at the door.

"Hello? Anyone in there?" a voice called out.

"What? Who's out there? The ship's life support is down!" I said.

"Oi, look alive gents, we've got a live one in here!" the voice said, clearly directing their words to someone else. Then they shouted back at me. "Do you have a breathing apparatus in there?"

"I used most of my mana reserves trying to save the ship, I couldn't power one even if I had it," I said.

"Boys, fetch an emergency apparatus from the stockpile!" the voice said. A minute or two passed before they pounded on the door again and said. "Hold your breath, buddy, we're cracking in."

I drew a breath quickly, and braced myself as they rammed their way through the door, allowing the air to escape despite the runes that had been keeping it contained. On the other side stood a woman in outdated imperial garb, flanked by several men wearing an assemblage of clothing from random places, in various states of repair.

"Knock knock," she said, tossing an amulet to me. I caught the piece of metal, and immediately felt a pocket of air form over my body, protecting me from the cold caress of the Void.

"Thank the gods you arrived when you did..." I said. "So who are you?"

"Ship crackers, junk filchers, scrap collectors, whatever you want to call it," the woman said. "We saw this derelict vessel floating about, and figured we might be able to get a good haul from it. Turns out it's fresh enough to have warm bodies in it, who knew?"

"So, not an imperial rescue team. I suppose that was too much to hope for," I said. "Have you found anyone else?"

"A few frozen corpses, and one comatose kid, but there are a few rooms we haven't searched yet. Come on, let's get you somewhere that has... You know, air," she said. She turned toward the man wearing a plaid vest and tricorn hat. "Bertie, check the next one while I escort our new guest..."

"Right away, Ma'am," the man said, walking over to a janitor's closet. If there was any more than a single servant in there, they were unlikely to have survived.

The posh woman led me through to a large fissure in the ship, with a door pressed against it into a different vessel. She the way into the halls of a somewhat past-its-prime ship full of random bits of treasure and memorabilia.

"What the hell is all this?" I asked.

"Loot, plunder, treasure... What's it look like?" she asked, continuing down the hall.

"Loot? Plunder? What sort of operation is this?" I asked.

"What do you mean what kind of- Oh, wait, you haven't pieced it together yet, have you?" she asked. "The name's Alexandria Torrentia Polypheus Renholt III, better known as Queen Tor-Pol."

"Queen T- Oh... Shit, this is a pirate vessel isn't it?" I asked.

"The best pirate vessel, thank you very much. You're aboard the Intrepid Valor," Tor-Pol said.

"Right... So what happens next?" I asked.

"Well, once we've found all your ship's personnel, living and otherwise, we'll remove any equipment and magical devices still in working order. Once those are out, we'll strip any valuable scrap from the ship, such as the rune conduits and burnt out rune matrices, then figure out whether it's worth dragging the remaining hulk in to be refitted or dismantled for parts, or if we should just leave it to fill some of the Void's endless hunger," Queen Tor-Pol said.

"I was actually more curious what would happen to me and my crewmates," I said.

"Ah, I see. Well, that depends on who you are..." the Queen said, pausing for a moment. "...That's, uh, that's your cue to tell me who you are..."

"Oh, sure. I am Velsor Tinnarus, Operations Magi of the Imperial Void Crawler Icarus. No, I did not get a vote on the name of our vessel, nor is the irony lost on me," I said.

"Ooh, Magi, eh?" Tor-Pol said. "Those are some valuable skills. Probably worth a pretty penny to ransom back to the Empire, or you could stick around and help out our little operation. Plenty of coin to be had, and we typically don't have imperial enforcers kicking in our door."

"Pretty piss poor at their jobs then," I said.

"Aye, more invested in crushing their own people than the actual outlaws, they are, but that's none of my business," Tor-Pol said with a shrug as she stepped into what appeared to be some sort of mess hall. She turned toward a young man wearing a striped shirt and a neckerchief. "Chauncy! Fetch our guest some bread and wine! And don't let him out of your sight, I've got to go oversee the rest of the search!"

"O-okay, Ma'am!" the young man said, stumbling over a chair as he tried to walk toward the barkeeper without turning his head away from me.

"You can relax, Chauncy! There's nowhere for me to flee to anyway!" I called after him.

"Right-o. Well, if all goes well more of your crew might be alive, but if I were you I'd start figuring out whether you want to join us or not. In any case, I'm off," Tor-Pol said, heading for the door.

I sat down at a table and waited for Chauncy to bring the food he'd been told to provide. The wine was foggy, probably a cheap Merlot from the look of it, and the only serving receptacle he brought was a shallow trencher and a cup, both made of wood. The "bread" was a ship's biscuit, as hard as a rock and about half as palatable, so I poured a bit of the wine onto the dish and let it soak into the bread.

"So, uh, how did you get stranded?" Chauncy asked.

"Ah yes, the one subject I was itching most to discuss at this exact moment," I said, narrowing my eyes at the young man. He shrunk back under my gaze, and I relented. "But I suppose it's worth at least venting a bit..."

I told the young man my take on events. How the Captain decided to chart a course directly through a boulder ring instead of going around as I had advised, acquiescing to the helmsman's insistence that "he could get us through" and that "it would be faster". By the time we'd gotten through, our defense system had burned through a quarter of our mana preventing the drifting stones from ripping us asunder. "No problem", they had said, "there's a rest stop in the next realm", but the station we reached had recently fought off a Void Dragon, so they didn't have enough mana in reserve to sell us any. Such was an ever-present risk in the Void, and the reason I didn't want to spend our energy unnecessarily.

We had trekked on, and found another crew in need of help. However, the captain didn't deign to wake me up, so I slept through the entire operation and we missed the chance to siphon their mana cores before leaving. By the time we docked next, we were at half of our max capacity, and said dock didn't have a mana station. We set out on the excruciating next leg of the journey, and ended up stuck in a time anomaly for a week, by the end of which we were so low on energy that we had to choose between keeping the lights on or keeping life support running...

"So what did you do?" Chauncy asked.

I stared blankly at him for a moment before saying, "Believe it or not, we elected to continue breathing and burned candles for light instead. Suffice to say, by the time the Voidlings showed up and breached our hull, the situation was basically doomed already. I swear, if there's any justice in this world the captain had better be among the bodies..."

As if on cue, a voice called out from the entryway into the mess hall. It said, "Velsor! Thank goodness you made it!"

"God dammit..." I said. I turned toward the boisterous man in his Imperial Naval Officer's uniform and said. "Hello, Captain."

If you're doing a single longform story for the first time, consider an episodic or semi-episodic structure. Particularly for those used to writing on this sub, it's going to be much easier to get through a single story chunk each day if that chunk is its own contained narrative, rather than writing 500 words about two people talking in an elevator while they wait for the next plot beat to happen.

It's a marathon, not a race. Don't feel pressured to write a lot every single day if it's burning you out, but make sure to write something so you don't end up with an insurmountable sprint at the end. The reverse is also true: even if you're a planner at heart, don't feel pressured to stop when you're still fired up with something just because you've hit your daily writing goal.

Remember that at the core of NaNoWriMo, you're basically speedrunning a first draft. Nobody's expecting a masterpiece to come out on your first try at a story, and it's okay if there's parts that feel really barebones when you're jotting them down. You're going to end up killing your flow if you stop to try to dot every i and cross every t as you go, so just make it "good enough" and let it rest until you've gotten the whole thing done.

A somewhat unusual piece of advice for those like me who have trouble with that last piece of advice and with keeping up their flow in general: Create a separate file for "editing notes", and just jot down which chapters you know are gonna need revision as you go. My first one was just a simple list of numbers with different highlights to show how bad I thought I did, which is a lot faster than actually correcting the weirdness and mistakes and lets you move on without the mental encumbrance of remembering what you need to do later.