Camp is over, and part of me is really glad.
Yesterday was the first time after thirty one days I wasn't trying to fit posting a blog at the optimum time into my life and honestly, it was great. Weird, but pretty freeing. I was still writing, because I still have my just after New Year's resolution of writing every day to keep up and I still have 4 the words challenges to do, plus digitising a whole bunch of drafts and false starts in case I want them at some point, but it doesn't really matter if I do that past ten at night when everyone in the house has gone to sleep. It doesn't really matter if there are typos or words missing, because that's not a one and done draft with only Grammarly to check it over. Thankfully, no one is going to read that, or not any time soon anyway. Yesterday was a pretty good day because it gave me some mental breathing room where I didn't need to think about what to write, when to write it and whether it was coming across in my "usual style".
Surprisingly, Camp has also been tough because of a loss of community. Now, that's not me saying that without in person events I don't feel like NaNoWriMo has a community, because we do. We kind of have several. There's the ML crowd, the Facebook crowd, the sprint leads crowd, the Twitter crowd, the forum crowd and the friends you met whilst travelling to a different group crowd, as well, and I'm probably missing a whole bunch of others, but particularly for London, I feel like our community values the events that we run and values the time we spend together in the basement of Pret on Hanover Square and I would be lying if I said I wasn't missing them. I miss getting a filter coffee and a breakfast sandwich, sitting with my friends, debating whether the music was at the wrong volume and moaning about the wifi and whether the plugs work. I miss us rearranging some of the basement to make us fit a bit better or to be able to be more sociable.
I talk about NaNo at work so people know that when I'm busy, it's not just work busy, it's life busy. I also want them to know if I'm tired, it might not just be a lack of sleep, but also writing can be quite taxing on my brain, so it can take me longer to think things through. The pressure of NaNoWriMo and the competition of it, even if it is only competing against yourself, gives me a solid kick up the bum to get writing, but it's also a long, exhausting trek and I'm always glad of a bit of a rest afterwards. It's also really nice to keep writing because I want to as opposed to being because I have to. This month was the second time we went through a competition in the pandemic, and I'm really glad for it, because both have kind of acted like practice runs for November. Having a dry run at it has been really useful, because it's given us time to think about what we need before November and see how restrictions might be. For some, that might have scared the pants off of them for what this November will look like, but for me, the practice actually makes me feel calmer and more confident that, whilst it isn't what we would choose and it's not what we asked for, we can get through this and it won't suck. Or it won't completely suck.
Everything is changing so quickly at the moment that I have no idea what November will look like, but if it looks anything close to what camp has, I'm not worried. Everything is a whole new experience at the moment, so if it means more time on Zoom calls, Skype and Facebook rooms or whatever, so be it. If we have to be together wearing masks, then that's how it will be. What I'm personally starting to doubt though is the return to normalcy we might have been expecting as this call began in March.
I know that this is going to bring unexpected challenges for some and unexpected delights for others. I know that we'll miss out on things like our favourite drinks in certain venues, the pumpkin ravioli in The Mad Hatter Hotel - I will never get over how beautiful that was, and how it made me realise that chestnuts are one of the most beautiful foods in the world - or sipping mulled wine together in Soho or Angel. It's more than just the food and the booze, of course, because there are some of our people that we only see in November and not seeing them for two years was not what we bargained for when we hugged or waved goodbye last November, but whatever happens, we will bare it the very best that we can, because it is what we have to do.
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