I had thought about doing NaNoWriMo this year – even after swearing I wouldn’t. I liked the idea of joining with other writers, of pushing myself to get a set amount of words written/edited. In the end, though, I didn’t commit – this month, we have Joy’s 8th birthday (yesterday); Carl’s mother’s birthday (in deference to her, I won’t mention which one); Carl traveling for a scholarly conference, leaving me the sole responsible adult for several days; Thanksgiving; and of course, any handmade Christmas gifts have to get started now.
November is never a great writing month for me.
I am trying to not let myself be lured away from the edits I am properly doing right now, and the short stories I would like to finish before the end of the year, to start a full-length sequel to From the Shadows. I have the faintest glimmer of an idea for it, which properly should be left to sit and develop before any writing ever happens (even if I didn’t have other projects to finish, WHICH I DO), but of course I get excited and want to start writing RIGHT NOW.
Discipline and self-control, right?
Sigh. Being responsible – even being responsible to the story itself by not rushing it, not to mention being responsible to the other stories I have begun and must not leave half done – is hard.
And don’t even get me started on how hard it is to be a responsible homeschool mom when I want to spend school hours writing instead …
“being responsible to the story itself by not rushing it” – THAT is an awesome thought, and one that I needed to hear articulated today. Because I went through that very thing yesterday. I was going to write STAR BRIGHT this NaNo – or at least make significant headway on it, hammer it out to near-completion. But then I realised that pushing myself to get word count on it is *not* what this story needs. And so I’m going to put STAR BRIGHT back on the shelf for this month (I think – unless it jumps back off), and I started writing something entirely different. No clue where it’ll go, no idea if I’ll finish NaNo with it, but it doesn’t matter. This story doesn’t matter (much) (yet). I owe it to STAR BRIGHT to give it proper attention.
Hey, how about getting the girls enrolled in Nano’s Young Writer’s Program (they can choose your own word count)? Then it’s *homeschooling*, and you can *all* spend *all day* writing, because, homeschooling, you know…
they can choose *their* own word count, that was supposed to say. 😛
Now look what you made me do – I had to write a whole blog post about it: https://amovitampress.wordpress.com/2015/11/06/you-owe-it-to-the-story-or-a-nanowrimo-about-face/
I don’t blame you. In some ways, it seems our schedules are finally starting to slow down, but I know that it will ramp back up in a couple of weeks. I often think that a lot of the people who participate must have no other responsibilities or relationships to be able to devote an entire month to writing so much.
Also, I totally commend you for knowing your limits. It’s always so easy to overcommit then feel like a failure when there’s just more things to do than there are hours in the day.
November is a lousy month to disappear for many of us. It was eye opening to discover the program started in the UK, where there’s no Thanksgiving holiday to eat up days of time traveling, preparing for family visits, or making a dozen pies. And their academic calendar is different–November is not end of term crunch time there like in the US. I basically single parent much of November because my professor hubby has to grade a thousand pages of undergrad essays this month.
I know there’s Camp NaNo in the summer. but I think my best month to hole up and draft might be, say, February. Maybe I should start my own Winter Camp NaNo. 🙂