We’ve passed the halfway mark on NaNoWriMo and I’m nowhere near my target. I was keeping up pretty good the first week. I was under budget by a few hundred at one point and I was over budget at other points. I even came real close to making up for two days of zero input while I edited and posted A/V Club from Hell #6. It looked like I was going to make it. But then a few things happened: I got busy at work, we got even busier at home and I wrote myself into a wall.
The busy part is easy to explain. Work picked up and I could no longer write while in the office. We got busy at home, mostly with school projects but also with friends. I had a choice: do I make the writing a priority and blow off the plans Teresa made or do I spend the weekend visiting with friends? Even though I contemplated it for a few seconds, it was never a contest. We had very important plans on Saturday and flexible/lazy plans on Sunday. But both days we got to spend time with people we love and don’t get to see very often. Sure, I wrote my ass off last year, but that was while I was complaining that I couldn’t be with the people I love. If I blew off the plans this weekend I may have stayed on target as far as word count, but I would have lost so much more…
The ‘writing myself into a wall’ part isn’t so easy to explain. Well, maybe it’s easy to explain but it’s hard to admit. I’m up to 19,000+ words, and I don’t like where I’ve gone with the story. I’ve pulled a restart (and notated a need to go back and make it fit later) twice now and I just fucking HATE the story. I’ve decided that from the angle I’ve written it, it’s not a long form story, it’s a short story at best. So I’m abandoning it. I started over with a completely organic storyline and it’s not even remotely related to the original 19000 words. I’m still writing every day and I’m trying to make the 1667 daily word count but I don’t have a coherent storyline trying it back to the original word count so I don’t think it should count as one work. Even if I kept the original count, I still have about 6000 words to catch up with the official word count.
So I’ve failed. But at least I tried. And I made my failure public. I did it because I still think the deadline works. Even though I’m out, I’m still trying to keep pace because the imaginary deadline is there every midnight. If I can write a hundred more words before I close the laptop, if I can write a few words before breakfast, if I can get a few words typed up while I’m waiting to pick Becca up from school… And that’s something I need to keep up all year long. I’ll count this year’s NaNoWriMo as a success if I come away from it with better writing habits and a better view on finding the time to write. A few words here, a hundred words there… All of these words add up to a story that wouldn’t have been written if I waited until I had the time.
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