What a weird turn of events this month has been, writing-wise.
I was not excited about my story idea for National Novel Writing Month but I at least had an idea and was able to start on Day 1 with words a-plenty. Even as I hit roadblocks in the first few days I always found a way to push through.
Then doom came to NaNoWriMo.
On November 7th I decided to take a day off and plan/plot/mull/whatever. This was a mistake. By design taking a day off slows momentum. You skip 24 hours and the next day you need to write 3334 words instead of 1667. The latter is not even intimidating to me but the former is. And if you don’t write those 3334 words on the following day you begin to slip further behind and risk not just killing the momentum, but salting the earth it’s buried under. Or something like that.
November 8th was the U.S. election that saw Trump elected. This was, in psychological terms, the equivalent of hearing, “The world has gone mad, nothing matters anymore. Give up. Stop.” And I did not write that day.
The next day felt like a bad hangover. I made another decision that was not necessarily unwise but also didn’t help. I switched back to another project, Weirdsmith. I’d re-read what I’d done during last year’s NaNoWriMo, liked it more than I’d remembered, and committed to picking it up. But I only wrote handfuls of words. I wasn’t able to get into the story’s zone so the next few days I stumbled about and fell even further behind.
Then I thought of revisiting Road Closed, my still-unfinished 2014 effort (I did hit 50,000 words with it, though). This is something I’d been wanting to do for awhile. I started tidying up the story into a workable format again and this is where I sit, with two weeks remaining.
I am not feeling overly confident. Or confident.
Tomorrow is November 17th. I feel like it will be a turning point or maybe I just want it to be one.
The other odd thing is that while my NaNo effort has sputtered, even my regular blogging has fizzled. It’s like all the energy I had pent up got sucked out by a few sour events and I’ve been unable to get past them. Or I like making excuses.
Which is why I’m making this blog entry tonight. Excuse-making time is over! Over-ish.
Almost over.
