So something weird happened this year and I don't know how to explain it. NaNoWriMo is still important to me, so don't think of this as me bowing out disgracefully, but this year has been a bit, I don't really have the words for it to be perfectly honest.
I knew from early on that this year was not going to be a competitive year because for one thing the way that the calendar fell was completely pants for the idea of super competitive, person best record setting days early in the month. Having a ten or twenty thousand word day relies upon a couple of things, one of those things is freedom from the responsibilities of work and everything else. Scouts would have had to take a backseat, and so would work, and that just wasn't possible. I am a civil servant which normally means I get a lot of leave to use throughout the year, but I've been camping a lot this year so I've been using days to go to site early and also to spend Mondays recovering from the lack of sleep and running around after numerous young people. I didn't have enough days to take the full week, or even the four first days of NaNoWriMo off, and still have leave for other plans until the leave year renews. I couldn't just skip out on one of my Scout nights because there was no one to cover for me.
Although I didn't expect it to be a competitive (with myself) kind of year, I didn't expect the slog that it has been. Next weekend is ANLI, and with the move that I made a few years ago now that means driving down to London and back over the course of the weekend, which will take out a lot of writing time for the travel, so I was hoping to have finished this weekend and honestly, I'm not even close. I struggle to find time to write on days I'm writing. In previous years I have squeezed in some time during lunchtimes, but work is busy at the moment, it's draining and honestly, even when I can log out of one laptop and into the other to write, well, I sit and stare at the screen and think, what do I even want to write? What do I want to say? I don't want to write a load of old poo, but I don't feel invested in what I'm writing at the moment. I committed to re-writing the novel I lost a few years ago, but I just wasn't feeling it. I remember the feeling I had back when I wrote Fairies and that electric buzz that ran through my body when I finally decided what I wanted to write and fell instantly in love with it. That hasn't happened this year. I've been waiting for it to happen, but it just hasn't.
In some ways, that is not surprising either. I've been really struggling mentally the last few months and that is partly because the world is a hell of a lot right now, like it is for everyone, but also because I take on too much. One of the reasons I do it is because I want to be involved in things that make the world even a little bit better of a place, and another is because I'm trying to distract myself from how horrible the world can be. When you head is so full of everything else, it's hard to give yourself the place to be creative. It's hard to focus on something and it's hard to emotionally commit to something else, because it's very easy to feel completely rung out.
In previous years I've done all sorts of things to get the words done, and it's been things like emailing myself when I've been commuting, or writing on my phone whilst I'm on the loo, in the bath, before going to sleep, or using speech to type whilst doing something like cooking. I've batch cooked food before November started so I can throw something into the microwave or eat it cold and keep typing one handed, or type between bites. This year, that did not happen.
I will still finish the fifty thousand words and I have still loved NaNoWriMo as a way to refocus my attention of writing and remind me that when I kick myself into it, I can do things I think are impossible, however it's also reminded me that sometimes the things we love we do need a rest from.
My plan for next year, when I will be very old, very grey and possibly even less able to function on little to no sleep, is to make sure I have enough leave left to take at least the first weekend of November off, and let the keys fall as they may. I am hoping to give myself the headspace to do something wonderful, even if it is just another of these stories that I write for myself and is for my eyes only, and hopefully go back to the point where other people look at me and think I'm slightly mad. Until then, I have words to finish.
