What Happens Now?

As NaNoWriMo23 comes to a close, I'm realising how weird it is that I've spent the month writing, but without recording it on the NaNo site and actually it was only when it was 'over' and I had finished the fifty thousand words that NaNo requires that I actually started writing the sequel I have been trying to write for a long time and it was probably the best thing I've tried to write for a long time. I thought it was going to be harder to let go of the whole of NaNo if that was what it came to, but what I have realised in the last few days has been that even though this has been the last fourteen years of my life, if it no longer fits it's okay to put it down and focus on the things which do. It's not like I'm resigning my typewriter to the scrap pile or trying to figure out being happy without writing (never works, or not for long anyway) or even like I'm giving up on something that puts on its boots only to kick them square up my butt to get me writing - metaphorically, of course.

Whilst saying goodbye to NaNoWriMo is not a certainty at the moment - it's going to depend on a few things - I definitely don't feel as distraught as I would have expected to and whilst that's strange, it is a very welcome thing. Although I did manage to let go of some things with NaNoWriMo what I will say is that this blog was typed during the mad dash before midnight which happens to have been my favourite part of NaNo each year and has been the sort of thing that was either the mad sprint to finish or the period where I tried to write enough to mirror what I had done on the first day (nailed it, just saying) and I have previously had a bottle of Prosecco in the house so that I could pop the cork and have a glass at midnight to celebrate it's over. I'm tempted to do that now, but at the same time I think I should leave it until the finish of the draft of the sequel. (Though I have a few bottles so there's nothing to stop me from having a glass tonight and then a glass from another bottle when the draft is finished. It would have to be different bottles because it's not going to be done in the next few days!)

Anyway, yes, NaNoWriMo is over and I am glad that the pressure is off of the whole thing, but at the same time, I can't wait for a conclusion to the whole thing to happen. The whole thing really does feel like a sword of Damacles over the head of the organisation, the community, and the whole damn thing. I hate it because it doesn't feel real and it doesn't feel like something that ever should have happened (obviously) and, in the strange way that NaNoWriMo counts things, we've not even quite reached 25 years for the organisation. If all we ever get to be is an organisation who had an amazing idea and wanted to bring together writers young and old, I hope the legacy looks like what we wanted it to, but if it doesn't, I hope that those of us who remember the best parts of it are able to look back and remember the best of it fondly. I know there are a lot of things that I will remember fondly, particularly getting to meet Chris Baty and discussing everything from the start of NaNoWriMo to his trip to Brighton and London, the trip to San Francisco and getting to meet some of the other Over Achievers in person and so many Municipal Liaisons, and most especially the train trip. And only in part because of getting to cuddle a puppy husky who was only about six weeks old and the most gorgeous little thing I had ever seen (to date, because I hadn't met Chai then.) And of course there will always be the write ins at KRO in Manchester before I left, my first year at university when the Manchester group called me and shouted 'We love you, Charlie' down the phone when my heart was breaking from missing home so much and I couldn't get the train back to Manchester to spend all of my time with them or to attend all of the events that the region were throwing. There were all of those All Night Lock Ins - the good, the bad and the online - train trips to Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton and then also the NaNoRillas where we explored more of London that some of us ever did alone. These memories might end up being all that is left, but if they are, then I guess it is a pretty great legacy. 

I guess the question is then, if I wrote this the night of the 30th November into 1st December, why has it taken me until now to post, because clearly I'm not doing what I was doing at the end of October where I was writing a few blogs in one day and scheduling them to go up one per day? Well, the answer is because a few things have still been hitting the fan with NaNoWriMo that are making me question whether what I have already done to step back are enough or whether I need to follow suit from what a few people (many of whom are former MLs or other long time supporters of the organisation) have already made the decision to do and make the decision to delete my account entirely. One of the things that makes me really reluctant to do that is that I don't want to lose the data and I have a really bad history with losing data, particularly when it is emotionally valuable to me. I also can't imagine getting to November next year and NOT going through all of my NaNoWriMo rituals and spending at least the first few days of the month seeing what taking things to the extremes can do (trying to write 50K in the least time possible is definitely taking things to the extremes) and taking it as an opportunity - if I need it - to recommit myself to writing when I've fallen off of the wagon a bit. Even if that's not done sitting under the NaNo banner, which this year wasn't really, it's always going to be connected to NaNo because that's where it comes from and the history is important to me. 

Decisions haven't been made yet by the board, or at least not announced yet, and I guess that I am still hoping that the right decisions are made that mean that the ship doesn't sink and we can keep NaNoWriMo or at least have a new and improved version as close to the original as humanly possible. I don't want to lose the good parts of what we have in NaNoWriMo, and I'm holding out hope that it can be saved, but maybe that is being unrealistically optimistic, and I just need to accept that it's time to walk away from any association with it. At the moment, I'm still sitting on the fence getting a splintery ass rather than making a decision one way or the other.

Since I wrote all of the above there has been a little bit more from the board, but it's not really been decisions other than bringing in a consultant... A few people have made the really big decision to leave, and honestly, I can't blame them, and I think it's going to continue to feel like a sinking ship until there is a good, solid outcome - like a change of personnel or really solid consequences for the things that happened and a lot of changes in certain areas that have been highlighted a number of times, or the majority of the community leaves, whether we have a new home or not. 

What Is Happening With NaNo?

 Right, so without rehashing all of the details of what has already been shared on so many different platforms now, I want to talk about what is going on with NaNoWriMo, why it's important and why it sucks.

Once a time, in what was actually a different century, way back in 1999, twenty one writers decided to do something a little bit crazy and try to write fifty thousand words (the industry standard minimum length for a novel) in a month. I was going to write 'in thirty days' but I want to say the original one happened in July, so it wouldn't have been thirty days!

From humble beginnings it became something incredible, because it spread across the globe, with participants in a number of different languages, with forums and somewhere in the last 25 years, the Young Writer's Program was born, and the program started support, well, young writers. You have to be 13 to be on the forums, or to have an account which doesn't have your parent's email address on it, but you can job younger, particularly if your teacher or another educator is running a program to help get young people writing. You can also access the main forums from age 13 as well, where young writers can ask question of, less young writers, or can just discuss life, the universe and anything else. 

Somewhere along the way, because of a number of different reasons, the forums have become a problem both on the 'main' site and also on the YWP and there are a lot of details to that, and it's shit, because these spaces are a refuge for many of us, a haven for many of us, and they have been the space where we are social, where we find our answers and where we find our friends. These spaces are sacred in a way, but right now, they're locked, and that is the way that they should stay until they can be managed safely.

Writers are a lot like other artists; they're strong but they're also really fragile. There's been trauma dumping going on in the forums which is difficult enough for an international group of adults, but when it happens in the children's space and kids are feeling the pressure of supporting other people, particularly their friends through significant mental health issues, something is going wrong. When users of a forum can't rely on the people there to protect them, even when it's from each other, there is a major problem. Some of the issues have been so significant that they have required reporting to law enforcement and that's a really sticky situation, because of the international nature of the group.

I don't think anyone ever imagined, back in 1999 that we would reach a peak of 400,000 people (I think that was during COVID) and still be around 350,000 people today. Well, we were before these issues became so universally known. The impact of that change and the global reach of the website have made this project a lot more complicated than could have been anticipated back then, and another accusation that has been banded about over the last few years particularly, is that the projects are still very much America-centric. For a number of us, that is categorically true. Participation is possible, but different for international people. When I flew to America in 2018 because of NaNoWriMo I was one of two people who had flown over and the other lady was from Germany. Everyone else was from somewhere in America (except for one of the staff who was from Canada). Now I know that's a least in part because it was an utter privilege to be able to do it, but at the same time, it's the biggest event of NaNoWriMo and there wasn't really anything like virtual participation. I'm not sure what the answer is for something like that, but being focused mostly on America is a problem, particularly when it comes to fundraising. 

One of the big reasons that this is so bad is because NaNo has been hanging on by a thread for a long time. Things that were planned upgrades for the sites weren't able to happen because there was just no budget. The organisation does have sponsors, but the majority of the operating budget is from donations and those donations have a long way to stretch. They fund the websites, the forums, the staff, the packs sent to schools which support YWP as well as the gifts given to MLs (regional leads) to say thank you for their support, as well as the stickers that are sent to regions with MLs for participants. There are designers to pay, tech support and so much more. Anything which affects public opinion of the organisation, like the accusations that have been made, always impacts the financial contributions that are received by the organisation and the capacity to recover from that is going to be stretched because there wasn't a lot of buffer anyway.

The worse part, even than the money because we have worked with less, is that the trust in the organisation could be shattered beyond repair. If things aren't resolved for the YWP, those young people might be lost from the organisation for good, and if adults manage to replace what the organisation gives them with something else, then the entire community that has been built could be slashed to bits, and actually it looks like it is happening, or it is very close to happening. 

Having been part of this since I was 16, I know how important the organisation has always been to me, but I also know that keeping it is not an at all costs thing, and that has only really come about because of the fact that losing it has been a very real possibility in the last few weeks. Without it being the safe space that it should be for everyone, it doesn't have anything like the same value. We're working with the forums shut down and honestly it's fragmented the community more than destroyed it, but I guess that's a kind of destruction. 

Why does mindfulness colouring work?

Okay, I'm not putting this up for debate. What I'm saying right now is that mindfulness colouring does work to reduce stress levels and make you feel calmer. Now, it's not going to appeal to everyone and it's not going to be something which is enough to reduce some people's stress enough to make you feel "better" but it is a stress-busting method. That's not to say that there are no problems with it, but it does work.

One of the reasons it works is because it's self-soothing. One of the great things about something self-soothing is that it doesn't matter where you are or who you are with, it's possible to reduce your stress levels. That's really important at the moment, given that COVID has made people more isolated than they have been previously. It won't stop you from feeling isolated, but it will be a soothing exercise which will be able to reduce your stress levels. 

One of my favourite things about it though is that it's pretty cheap. It upsets me that because it became such a trend and some of these colouring books were becoming really expensive. Considering the stress that finances cause us, I find that really difficult to accept, but if money is a problem then it is possible to get a children's colouring book pretty cheaply and either crayons, coloured pencils or felt tips from places like the pound shop or Wilko which make it more accessible. I appreciate that it still might be outside of some people's budgets though. 

One of the main reasons that mindfulness colouring works is because it gives us something else to focus upon than all of the stressors in our lives. If all you have to think about for a few minutes is what colour you want to make a certain part of the picture, that's good, because that's not something that should cause us stress. 

When you get to the end of the picture, there's a sense of achievement that should make you feel good. I say should, because there are some issues with this. The sense of achievement at having finished it can be marked with other things. The achievement is good, and you might be really impressed that you don't feel very creative or artistic, but this is a thing that you've created and this is something artistic. If you've planned it, you might have got something that you want to be artwork on your wall, or for your children or for a gift for someone else. Maybe that influenced your colour choices when you were making them! It's great to have that, but it's also not completely necessary. I know of people who have coloured in their pictures and then they either rip them up, as another little stress buster or they put them in the recycling. If you know that you have used none toxic colours, you can shred the paper and use it for things like hedgehog or rabbit bedding. It might be possible to donate long paper shreddings (not out of a cross-cutting machine) to your local wildlife sanctuary for them to make use of. 

Some of us though, and I say us because I'm definitely in this group!, are hypercritical of everything we do and that extended to our self-soothing exercises. There's a little voice in your head like a mental woodpecker and rather than making a tapping noise as it's drilling into a tree, it sits there saying things like, you're not flexible enough for yoga, you're terrible at this, you're making a tit of yourself. When you're in talking cure therapy, it might be saying something like 'the therapist has heard all this before' 'you're just moaning' 'there are people with real problems in the world'. When you've done your mindfulness colouring, it might be saying that you've coloured over the lines in places, chosen the wrong colour in others and that you've wasted a whole lot of time colouring when you could have been dealing with the things that are making you stressed. It might also make you question whether to give someone the piece that you were thinking of giving them, because 'why would they want that?' 'you're not a child; they're not going to put your artwork on the fridge now you're x years old.' We are quite vicious with ourselves sometimes. 

When you speak to yourself like that, try and catch yourself.  Try and remind yourself that if you said that to anyone else, you'd think you were mean, so don't speak to yourself like that! You are not your own punching bag. It takes practice and it sometimes takes energy that we don't think we have, but it's worth saying, I'm not an artist, but I'm proud of what I have done. I was struggling so, at the time when I was colouring, I needed to do something self-soothing, because, after that, I went off and did... whatever is on your to-do list. You can't operate in a constant state of panic for very long. You don't function well in that environment, so giving yourself the time and space to calm down, even just a little, means you can recalibrate and then do things effectively afterwards. 

It's also worth remembering when you colour outside of the lines, you're not using mindfulness colouring to try and get a piece of artwork into the Tate or any other gallery; it's a tool to help you to have a minute and calm yourself. Gifts don't need to be the best pieces of artwork either - you just want them to be thoughtful and you want them to know you've spent your time on something for them. Nothing is more valuable than your time. 

There's something else you can try as well though when you're colouring. It's not supposed to be a high level, highly focused activity, but when you are colouring, try to control your breathing. Try to meditate at the same time, but not the way that we normally see people meditating of sat cross-legged and eyes closed. Think about your breathing, and focus on a good breath in through the nose and then a longer breath out through the mouth. It might seem a little odd, because how can you breathe out more than you breathe in, but it's more, holding your breath and controlling the release of it. You want to try and get away from the ideas of ragged breathing or hyperventilating that you can get into when you're anxious or your scared or you are pushing yourself into that panicked breathing. It doesn't have to be the whole time that you are colouring, but a couple of minutes, or even a minute - an actual, full minute, sixty seconds of commitment - is enough. And it, like a lot of things, will become easier with practice. If your brain tells you that you look or sound like 'a tit' remember that it doesn't matter what you look like in this moment, or what your sound like. You need a minute and you can have a minute. You can do it with your children or with others, and the quiet companionship of it is actually another great assistance. 

It's possible to look at other options as well, like apps for mindfulness colouring. It's something whether you can be looking at your phone - though I would remind you that doing this just before bed won't help you sleep as well as the paper version because of the blue light on screens  - or an iPad or other device which you can get the apps on. I would suggest putting on a 'Do Not Disturb' function or similar, so Facebook, Twitter or whatever else is trying to suck your attention away from it. The great thing about it is it colours in the lines for you and some of them even tell you what colour goes where. You can still pair it with mindfulness breathing exercises and it will still have an effect, though I believe there have been studies which show that the effect of putting pen (or pencil, or crayon) to paper has a different effect to when we're using our phones or typing on a laptop. 

You might be wondering why on Earth I'm talking, or er, writing, about this at the moment, but the reason is that COVID has eaten into the resilience that a lot of people have, and it has stolen some of our coping mechanisms. It has stripped people of friendship networks and human connections that we need and forced on us a solitude which has made many people severely uncomfortable. Sat here in my office in Manchester, I'm trying to tell myself not to worry about what looks like the second wave sweeping over Europe and reports of third waves in other places. I'm doing what I can to look after myself with all the hand washing and mask-wearing, and I'm making masks for the people around me to try and make the people I love safe, but I also know that if a second wave hits, my medication is sorted, mostly, and I'm in a good, well goodish, place mentally. I'm with my parents and my dog, so not lost and lonely in my little flat in London, and I have a few good coping mechanisms that are making me feel better, but I worry about the people around me, and also people that I don't know. Self-control and self-care are good ways to increase your resilience and make you better able to cope with the stress and trauma that we're trying to deal with in our lives at the moment. I talk about mental health a lot, so it seems like a logical extension of that. :) 

Man's Not Hot

No, I'm not going to quote the song any further, I promise, but it seemed like an appropriate title for this blog. 

When I started Camp NaNoWriMo this month, I was planning on writing thirty-one blogs about writing over the course of the month, but then this blog has always been a bit of a blend between my life, my writing and mental health issues, so it seemed natural to veer off into that, but this particular blog is about writing and it's about characters. I'm going to specifically talk about characters we write to inspire attraction in the reader. 

Inevitably, the kind of people we are attracted to is probably going to translate into a novel even if we try and avoid it, though writers in historic fiction will research and look at what was attractive at the time, common hairstyles, how people were built and how they dressed. It would be illogical to write a female character in the Victorian era who was upper class and extremely chaste, then have the Love Interest (LI) or MMC (Male Main Character) be most attracted to her ankles or something which wouldn't be on display because of the clothing that chaste Victorian women wore. Whilst there is diversity within attraction, it's possible to borrow from the Peter Kay joke about Manfred Mann's song Do Wah Diddy Diddy, a girl snapping her fingers and shuffling her feet looking good, and that not seeming to make any sense. 

Some things are timeless classics. The tall, dark and handsome thing seems to have stood the test of time pretty well, even if the understanding of it has changed a little over time. Mr Darcy has always been a good MMC for the tall, dark and handsome thing, but more modern audiences struggle to connect with the idea of his pride and arrogance, and it can be difficult to forgive that, despite it being a product of the time and social context that he lived in. 

There are characters now where we think in the book, yeah, he sounds beautiful, and then they are lost when translated to screen, such as Edward Cullen. I was disappointed at best when Robert Pattinson was cast in that role, even though I like him in other things he's been in. Maybe it was just everything else that was wrong with those movies that didn't help, but I've even seen descriptions where I question what the author was thinking making someone a love interest in a story because I don't and can't relate to the main character (MC) for finding them as irresistible as they do. It's as though someone wrote Joe Exotic as an MMC in a romance novel; I just wouldn't get it. Anything with a mullet and that's me done though, I guess. 

Then again, that can be a difference in culture - perhaps in the Deep South in America, he's seen as a hot option - and also to do with time periods. When you say tall, dark and handsome to women of some generations, or even just different women, they might think of someone with rippling large muscles and body hair as thick as a gorilla's, whereas I might think toned, solid shoulders and tone down the hairiness a lot of degrees. 

We have to accept that readers are going to have a different image of our characters in their heads to what is in ours, and that's okay. We have to accept that the MMC or LI character is not going to be considered an attractive description by everyone, but it's why looser descriptions aren't always a bad thing. If the reader can flesh out some of the details themselves, that can be helpful in some ways. 

Of course, there's no right answer though. There was a time when a ginger character, like Annie, would have been seen as the most undesirable orphan, and yet now people love ginger hair. I'm a bottle ginger because it suits my skin tone better than the flat chestnut brown I am naturally, but also there are people like Prince Harry and Ed Sheeran, whose ginger hair is seen as a massive asset. Things will change, people's tastes are different and if not, well the world just wouldn't work, would it, but it's something to think about as you paint a picture in the head of your dear reader about the different characters in your novel. It's also okay to write about a character as the LI who wouldn't be considered physically attractive, because physical attraction is only a part of what makes us fall in love, and it doesn't have to be a very important part. In the Netflix film Tall Girl, the Main Female Character has a very specific idea in her head of what she wants, physically, and yet the *SPOILER ALERT* ending shows that she sees that as far less important. 

So, this is my last blog from Camp NaNoWriMo and must be the first time I have ever achieved my Camp NaNoWriMo goal, so I'm really proud of that. I'm also really thrilled with the number of people who have been reading my blog as this month is currently my second highest readership ever, and it's on track to be the first by the end of today. I'm crossing my fingers a bit because that would also feel like a pretty huge achievement, so we'll see. 

I've made changes throughout the month, like remembering that a lot of people who read what I write don't actually hang out on Twitter, so whilst it's become my favourite spot, I need to remember that Facebook is still a thing and share links across the both of them. I've also realised that posting late at night just to make sure I get the blog for the day posted doesn't really work out so well, so I've been making an effort to write and post at more civilised times of the day. 

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to keep up posting one blog a day, especially as there have been times this month where I have stared at the blank screen and wondered what the hell I was going to write, but I am committed to making more of an effort to continue writing on the blog and hopefully also launching the charlieswrite.co.uk website soon, though that will depend on how well I get through every other thing on my To-Do list as well.

It's been a really interesting month because making time for writing isn't always easy and having the capacity to write is not always easy, but actually, it's okay to hold your hands up and say I can't do this right now, and I have done that once this month. Most of us don't have the luxury of being able to give up our full-time jobs to solely focus upon writing, not that I think I would if I had the option, so fitting it in around every other thing in life is always going to be a struggle, but what has been really valuable to me this month is I have found that I can do it. I can find the time, I can find the energy, most of the time anyway, and I can make my writing a priority, even in the middle of a house move, work chaos, life chaos and a mental health lapse that is still not completely resolved. It is possible, it's not painful and it's good for me, so I'm going to take that lesson going forward and hopefully remember it in November as well so I know I don't have to do things like twenty-four hour marathon sprints on the first day to write as much as I can whilst aiming for finishing in less than my previous personal best. I'm not saying I won't do that, but I am saying I don't have to. 

A lot could change over the next few months, but what is extremely exciting to me at the moment is having the time to figure that out, think of a plan and exactly three months from today will be a Saturday, getting ready for one of the weirdest NaNoWriMo's ever. I'm going to have to educate my mum on Annual Pizza Day.