What Am I Most Concerned About When It Comes To NaNoWriMo This Year,

 What Am I Most Concerned About When It Comes To NaNoWriMo This Year,

I feel like I have been writing a lot about what it’s like to ‘do’ NaNoWriMo and the best kind of days et, but I’ve kind of been doing it through a lens of I don’t want to talk about certain things because I don’t want to think about them.

First off I have been having issues with my laptop. First and foremost this is a worry because I cannot hand write quickly enough and I really, really hate having to sit and count up words. I also really don’t like looking at average words per page and trying to work out how much I have written on that basis. I don’t know whether the issues are with the Internet or that I’m depending too much from the laptop itself. I hope it’s not the second because it’s a Mac and it’s only six months old, but who knows? 

I’m also worried because I have a gig the night that NaNoWriMo starts and I don’t know if I will be home by midnight. Since I don’t currently own a camper van, I will have to come back home before I start writing because I can’t just take my home, or my satellite home, to the gig and then get some sleep afterwards - however short - then set myself up to start to write. I can’t even just head back to the car and start to write, which will be frustrating because I’m probably going to be in a queue to leave the multi-storey car park like I have been when leaving gigs before.

I’m worried because I’ve taken some time away from work recently and I can’t remember what time, if any, I have booked away from work for the start of November and I know it will be very frustrating to have to be working during the earliest days of November and not have the opportunity to write like I want to, with the speed that I want to, if I find the ability to do it again.

Bringing that up, I need sleep more than I used to do. I feel like I’m never going to be able to push myself the way I did five years ago and I won’t be able to achieve what I did that year, but at the same time, if I want to try, I need to try. Yes, Fall Out Boy isn’t going to make that easy, and the total shambles that is the voice to text app that I’m using. If that was working properly, I might have a fighting chance of being able to make a start on the drive back, but I also appreciate my mother would be spitting feathers if she knew I was ‘writing’ at the same time as driving.

I think my biggest concern is that, when I’m back in work and I’m writing as well, I’m worried I’m going to be running though coffee like it’s going out of fashion (which I sometimes fear it is with the popularity of things like matcha latte) and that it’s going to be all I can do to keep myself focused for long enough to get through work and writing, and that if I don’t collapsed into bed from tiredness, I’ll be so caffeinated that I can’t sleep and too many days of that - about two days of late, though once upon a time it was six - and my brain just breaks. Even tea did for me once, because I quite like strong tea and I drank a lot of it, and I didn’t sleep for more than twenty minutes that night because my brain wouldn’t switch off. I thought it was the caffeine at the time, but now I know about the ADHD, I don’t know if it was more that, because I was in love with my novel and I just wanted to carry on writing it.

I’m worried I won’t love my novel, I’m worried I’ll love my novel too much. I’m worried I won’t have the time, or the energy or the inspiration. I’m worried about so many things, but the thing I need to remind myself of right now is that I have felt this every year for a lot of years, and this year is not different. It’s okay to be worried, it’s okay to be challenged, in fact, it is what NaNoWriMo is for, and that’s what makes it so phenomenal.