It's been over a week since the calendar flickered over into the dreaded month of October and for most people it means the world gets colder, the days get darker, and everyone has a mostly unneeded excuse to watch scary films. I say mostly unneeded because if you like it and you want to watch it, I think you should go ahead, but people like me need someone with them to be convinced to watch most scary films and a few of my friends won't even watch them then, but saying 'But Hallowe'en is coming' seems to be enough enticement. By the way, yes, I do know that Hallowe'en is considered to be an archaic spelling, but I don't care. If you don't know why it's Hallowe'en, click here.
One of October's other names, at least if you are in the NaNoWriMo world, is Preptober. Preptober is the month before the biggest month on the calendar - NaNoWriMo - and it is when we get ready for November and the start of NaNo. For some people that means planning out their novel and what they are going to write, for some it is a scribble of an idea on the back of a postage stamp, and for others it is no different than any other month in the calendar in terms of writing. They write or they don't write, but they don't plan because writing is more fun by the seat of your pants. No prizes for guessing which camp I pitch my tent in! Preptober means different things to different people and often for me it's about nesting. Everything that I can do to make where I'm living more comfortable, and then also things like making ready meals for the early days of November, considering that otherwise I would either forget to eat, live on take out or I would just be having snacks that I could grab quickly. (Originally I just thought that this was being a full indoctrinated WriMo, but it's definitely more of an ADHD thing.) When I lived in the flat in Sutton, I did manage to convince myself to go to Morisson's a few times and get things from the salad bar, and even convinced myself to eat a banana once in a while. I think that that was the year I finished really quickly as well, though that was after I had finished the initial fifty thousand words and I was carrying on to see how far I got. I intended to write until about a hundred and fifty thousand but then I pretty much ran out of steam and decided to finish on something like a hundred thousand and one words because I quite like palindromes, but then realised that if I finished on a hundred and one thousand and two words, because that meant that I finished the last day with the exact same number of words as I finished on the first day, so whilst it wasn't the sort of perfect and obvious palindrome I was going for initially, it was still something like one. It made for a pretty graph anyway.
This year Preptober is more about me putting myself back together a bit so that I can actually function through NaNoWriMo since I'm really struggling with executive disfunction and a few other things at the moment. This year it is even more important for me to use Preptober to get myself ready for November because otherwise November is going to be a rough one. I don't know what I will be writing by then, I have no concept of whether I will be struggling to write then or not, if it's going to be a little bit of a slog or if it will be something a lot easier like it has been before. When I was writing 'Fairies' I didn't know what I was writing until about day three and then I enjoyed the process of writing the rest of the novel, because it felt like it fell out of my head through my hands, and it was beautiful. I still love that novel like the day I wrote it, which is far more than the day I edited it.
What's strange to note is that this is the first Preptober in a long time that I haven't been an ML. I decided to step down, and it was a decision I was somewhat torn by at the time, that I'm still torn on now, but ultimately I knew that it was the right decision to make. There were a lot of things going on that lead to me making that decision but none of it was not wanting to lead the region. I loved the London region. I love the people, I love the city and I love the community and events that have been years in the making, and it wasn't really something I ever thought I would be ready to step away from. Although it's not even close to being the reason I decided to step down, I'm actually glad that I'm not having the responsibility of MLing this year because it means that I can focus on looking after myself and making sure that I'm okay, or at least getting there. As much as it feels selfish to say it, I feel like it's actually quite important for me to do that right now.
What I have considered though is, given the issues with Twitter and my personal dislike of Discord, I wanted to think of a different way of being involved in the community. I've previously used Twitter a lot and also my blog, and whilst I'm still happy with one of those, I have been tempted by the idea of using Twitch particularly with 4thewords, but also potentially for a few other things, though saying that I'm not sure that NaNoWriMo would be the best time to do that because the kind of interactions which make a stream actually work aren't really the sort of thing that most people have time for during November, because some people are trying to juggle with their lives and their novel and other people are able to be intensely novel focused, and neither type of person is in the place to be involved with a Twitch stream, even if it would be a good platform to run an overnight event on, alongside Discord, which I really wish that we had thought about before, because during COVID we could have really used it, though I'm not sure that their co-hosting feature was available during that time. Whilst I'm considering it, I am thinking that it might be something that I need to work on for next year as opposed to trying to do it for this year, given that I'm not in a good place at present and given that it's the sort of thing that would take a bit more setting up than I have the time to devote to right now. I'm also not amazingly familiar with the system and again it's not the sort of thing that I think I can remedy as quickly as I would need to. Which is a shame, because it's the sort of thing that could be really cool.
This turned far more into a stream of consciousness than I originally planned it to be, but sometimes that is what actually gets me to focus enough to write, so it's not a bad thing. Expect more babble as October goes on...
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