How's Today's NaNo Going, Charlie?

Well, I was working, didn't really take a lunch break, still don't have my head on straight after a few days of feeling like my brain was just causing panic attacks every hour on the hour and a few more as surprises and I just went to copy across my words from my Dana to my PC and I forgot to press the start sprint button because I'm actually a bit of a moron, so all those words were counted for NaNo but not in my current sprint battle with a monster I'm trying to defeat to open a new area. (I love how nerdy 4thewords makes me sound :))

I had fully intended to get up today and be a fully functional human again because I actually managed to get to something that felt a bit more normal yesterday after a very slow start, but unfortunately, I couldn't sleep properly anyway and then Teddy started snoring. I know he can't help it but having a companion animal that doesn't sound like they have aggressive sleep apnoea would be wonderful. I had even put a bottle of Sneak by my bed so I could caffeinate early, but unfortunately, it was not to be.

That being said, I should still be able to break the 30K barrier today and I realised this morning, thanks to Facebook memories, that the record I was trying to break, I actually did it last year, so my all-time PB is actually already five days and that was the best I was hoping for this year after the first day didn't quite go to plan.

What I am really thankful for this year as opposed to last is that the verbal abuse, or written abuse, that was hurled at Overachievers has died down. I get that people struggle to understand how the likes of the Overachievers do what they do at the speed that they do it, but that isn't a reason to be sour about it. Granted, I'm not sure if there are more people accepting that that's the way it is because people have decided to be a bit more compassionate or because they know a lot of people have ended up at home that would not have chosen to be there and that additional time on your hands can really help, even if the additional stresses don't. I think we all might be a bit slower than usual as well because the pandemic stress is touching all of us. That may just be my perception of it though. Either way, I'm really glad, because it is thoroughly disheartening in an otherwise exceedingly inclusive competition. 

Something else I found really encouraging recently was Grant Faulkener's admission that he had not been writing for a few days because of the election. Sometimes it is difficult to accept that external forces will have that impact on u. Whether it makes you more jittery or unable to focus, or you're just so busy with other things, it isn't necessarily a bad thing and it doesn't mean that it's over. No one has to make up three days word count at once, no one has to be writing every day, and no one should feel ashamed if the world outside their front door is a little bit scary and it makes you feel a bit neurotic. We're still only in the first week. We have plenty of time.

Something Happened and Now I'm Typing Really Slowly,

 No, it's not an injury and no, I don't think it's anything sinister, but I was hoping to be further ahead of NaNoWriMo par by now and I'm on 25k. I was hoping to beat my record of 6 days, set last year, but being 7k behind what I had planned on the first day didn't start me off too well and yesterday was less than great, so I feel as though something happened and now my typing speak has dropped. 

To be fair, I think it's more of a focus thing. The last couple of days I have been really out of it, or so it feels when it comes to trying to focus on anything and it just slips off into the ether. I was considering typing the rest of this from the bath before I realised I needed a bit of a brain break from writing for twenty minutes. 

Maybe I could actually do with taking a few days off of writing, but this is November, so that is not happening. 

This Is Really F*ing Troubling,

Okay, so I've written a couple of things recently which have been anti-FGM. The reason I have written them is because I am completely anti-FGM. I'm against the medicalisation of the cultural practises, I'm against the ritualised traditions that occur in specially constructed huts at the end of a garden as described in Cut and I am deeply disturbed that there are plastic surgeons who offer surgeries to "correct" or alter the look of a person's labia. I understand that this will not always be a cosmetic procedure and there will potentially be cases where women medically require such interventions, and I get that, but holy F it makes me uncomfortable to think of it, because so many of us hate the way our vaginas look and this type of "treatment" being available doesn't help. 

Over the past couple of days my Twitter has been pretty loud with the debate as to whether Male Genital Mutilation (MGM) and FGM should be on the same platform, and in some ways, I really agree with that, but the problem with that stance is the expectation that campaigners who are worked to stop FGM as part of a wider issue of violence against women and girls and the inequality that exists in the world have been feeling forced to adopt such a platform that is not theirs and not the one which they have devoted their time to, and it seems that some are keen to continue pushing for this to happen. 

Now, the reason I am rehashing this here is that I've seen some of the responses to my comments and also the people supporting my view that FGM and MGM are separate issues within this space (i.e. when they're being talking about in a broader campaign regarding violence against women and girls like forced marriage and honour-based violence, or we are talking about equality) and a lot of them are either self-defining as TERFs or displaying a lot of media to support J.K.Rowling and the comments which she made which have lead people to term her as a TERF. I say it in that way because I accept that some see TERF as a derogatory word, but also because I've never seen her self-define as a TERF. For those not aware of the term, or where it came from, it's a shortening of the term Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist and was originally created by a person inside of said subgroup of feminists in order to differentiate between Radical Feminists and TERFs. 

I'm going to state this as simply as I can - I am not a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. 

I am a very big believer that the rights of transwomen are women's rights issues. I'm also a big believer in bodily autonomy, particularly when it comes down to genital autonomy, so I don't believe in circumcision without specific medical necessity and only then by a qualified professional, and only if it was a situation where the child cannot wait until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves. I believe the same when it comes to the genital/bodily autonomy of someone who is intersex. It is not for a parent or a doctor to make a decision as to whether that person should be assigned male or female. Obviously, there is sometimes a medical need for some form of "corrective" surgery, but it is my understanding that very often surgery is performed to try and "normalise" the appearance of the genitals as opposed to being due to a reason of function. 

I legitimately can't believe I'm having to sit here and say this, but it is something which is exceedingly important to me. 

Day 2

 Why do I never learn my lesson? 

Every single year, I lose words. It's inevitable really, except that it's not. When you're on edge and you are trying to write as much as you can in just a month, I swear that it is so possible and so probable to do something either just a little bit silly or fully stupid. 

A few years ago I was completely devastated when the ridiculous mistake that I made meant that I lost a full novel's worth of writing and it took me a long while to recover from that, but this year, all I did was press enter on a website, thinking that I was actually clicking it on the address in order to refresh the page, instead saving over the last few thousand words I have spent the last few hours working on. It's not like it was the greatest writing I've ever done, or anything that was worth sending to an editor or anything, but it was something I was pretty happy with as a first draft and some of it was making me cry, because I like the characters. So yeah, I'm in a bad mood now. This is why I like hand writing, even when it makes my hands cramp. 

I guess it will teach me to be more flipping careful. 

Day 1

 We are now over twelve hours into National Novel Writing Month in the UK, and honestly, it still does not feel normal. I was too tired last night really and it honestly felt like the world was conspiring against the whole of the competition as other people talked about coffee machines breaking and I realised that I had bought a hot chocolate that tasted like drinking a full mug of melted chocolate. It was far too rich and even the attempt to make it into a mocha so that I could get some caffeine and stay awake was all in vein. Not meeting in person was always going to be hard. Having to plan what I am doing around my parents' lives as well was always going to be hard, especially given that I have to think about meal times and what in the kitchen will not make too much noise and too much mess, and the volumes of particular keyboards as opposed to just which ones are most beneficial to my writing speed. (That would be the loud ones, apparently!!)

Where it all started going wrong last night though was the lack of a nap and the changing of the pizza. 

I have a routine for October 31st and it works. I go and buy Hallowe'en candy with no intention of sharing it, I get a cheap hot chocolate stick that will not be too sickly and I have my pizza that is cooked in twelve minutes because that works. I have said before that it does not taste great, but it fits into the routine and it works. Last night, my pizza was supposed to be in the oven for about twenty five minutes, so I had to adjust my nap time, I could not get myself to nap and then I was far too tired to write for the same midnight to three in the morning shift which has helped me to get to more than a couple of twenty thousand word days and honestly, it sucked. I was also writing at the dinning table, no external keyboard and just clicking away on the Pixel's keyboard and having to hit the backspace button constantly, because for some reason, I make so many more typos on this keyboard than my gaming keyboard and I do not know why. 

Trying to nap was hard as well, because I was obsessed with the fact that last year I overslept my alarm by about half an hour and it really threw me off. I know it might not look like that when I then still bashed my way through twenty thousand words on the first day, but it was honestly less than ideal circumstances. The last day definitely came in at twenty thousand a lot easier, because of planning and preparation of everything but what I was going to write. 

Anyway, that was the lengthy babble about how it is going and, as with everything else in November, it is unedited, so it might  be a load of crap. 

This Was Going to be a Tweet,

But I am a member of The Overachievers in National Novel Writing Month which doesn't exactly lend itself to brievity of expression and Twitter character limits are still too low for me to put this together properly. The briefest way that I can express it is this: 

I am pig sick of being told that there is a hierarchy when it comes to supporting causes or charities. 

Many people will tell you that it's a fallacy to believe that such a hierarchy exists, but then others will, when you express support for one charity or cause, question why you don't support something else which is tentatively connected or, in their mind, more important. One big example of this is during Hibo Wadere's campagin against FGM. 

To my knowledge, she has never said something along the lines of FGM is awful, but MGM is fine. (To clarify, not the movie studio, but Male Genital Mutilation). As far as I am aware, the best characterisation of her viewpoint is to say, yes, MGM is also bad, but that's not my fight. 

Her story is a very personal one. In one of the chapters in Cut which I was reading last night, she specifically states she was talking about her vagina. She talks about her culture, of course, but a lot of the conversation regarding the trials of women following FGM are her own story. It's her talking about recurrent infections, about the illnesses she saw her female family members experience and her perceptions of these and how long it took her to go for a wee after her mutilation. She is the perfect activist in the FGM space because she has experienced the trauma she is fighting against, and she has the lived experience of being in a culture that tells a girl that this is her lot in life, and she still said no. 

I'm not doubting that MGM, i.e. male circumcision for non-medical reasons, can have terrible side effects. I'm not even doubting that, particularly depending on the age a boy is when he undergoes this procedure, it can lead to the same level of trauma as Hibo experienced in her own story, but it very much isn't her fight, and it shouldn't be. She's no better placed than I am to tell someone what should or shouldn't happen to their penis, or how it felt when her penis was cut. If men and boys feel that it is a trauma and are angry in the way that Hibo was, they too can choose to break the stigma and talk about it, and they can choose to share their experiences. That's where Hibo's activism started. That is where the best kinds of activism start, because it's not about these traditional roles of "white saviours" walking in and "Westernising" the cultures of other countries. 

If there is something you are passionate about, learn about it, speak about it, raise awareness, raise money - you do you - but there's no legitimate reason to try and take a crap on someone else about causes that they're not acitively seen to be supporting. We only get a certain amount of time, and there is only a certain amount that we can do. You conserve your energy or your spoons for the things you feel the need to address. 

Personally, I think Hibo Wadere is an absolute rock star in the best sense of the phrase. 

This Doesn't Feel Right,

This year has been a bit of a weird one, to say the least, and coming up to NaNoWriMo is no different. It was a number of weeks/months ago now that Hq announced we weren't sanctioning in-person events and that was fine because it was logical and equal and it seemed like things might be a bit better, but not normal, here in the UK. Obviously, that's now not the case. 

When I made the decision to move back to Manchester, it wasn't a decision I took lightly. It was an upheaval of my entire life, and though there were good reasons for it, it has been a trauma, not least because of the logistics of getting everything here, but living half out of a storage locker is challenging to say the least, and all the while I have been wanting to make sure I'm not putting my life on hold. 

With NaNoWriMo upon us, part of me is wishing I could have build a small shed with a portable heater at the bottom of the garden where I could retreat to, and where midnight writing sessions wouldn't disrupt my parents sleeping upstairs, because I like to talk to myself when I write and I like big, loud, clanky keyboards that are not really the best when your "office" space is meters away from other people's bedrooms. My second thought was to look for a cheapish Airbnb to rent for a couple of days/weekends so that I had something like a bolthole to go and stay in whilst I was taking part in the most antisocial of the writing sessions, though I think that the whole talk of national lockdown might have killed that dream, as well. 

The whole thing feels weird and the idea of being stuck in the house twenty-four-seven (because I have no desire to run in this weather) is not appealing in the slightest. My desk is also buried gone, not that there would be floor space for it, since I thought it was buried in the furniture pile at the back of my storage unit. I can't even clamber in there for a bit of peace and writing time. 

This probably reads as a really moany thing; it certainly feels it! I don't want to be whiny about it because I fully understand why the lockdown stuff is happening, but I just find it so hard, and there are certain people I would really rather not be away from whilst all of this is going on. 

I will try and brighten up a little as the month goes on.