November books: 0/5 (but getting close on at least one)
Apologies on the first picture, I kind of fell over while taking it.
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Happy first week of November, squiders. As of yesterday I have written 9.6K so far this month and am essentially on track to do a Nano. The generation ship story is sitting at 11K overall.
Squiders, before this past week, my largest monthly word count for the year was September at 5.5K.
I’ve talked to you guys about how hard writing has been this year, and I know last week I was very maudlin about absolutely everything (I do think the atmospheric music I was listening to was not helping that. I listen to atmospheric music when I want to make sure a scene has the right tone and feel, and I was trying out a new one, and I guess I didn’t reckon on it affecting my blogging mood quite so much). Despite all that, I do feel like there was some truth to what I was saying. I tried to do some research on burnout, but almost everything I could find was about work burnout, not general life burnout.
I did meditate once, which I think helped, but despite me saying, “Oh, that was beneficial, I should do that a few times a week,” it has not happened again.
So how do we get from “help, my mental health” to essentially 10K a week later?
(insert confused noises here)
Last year I wrote 30ishK during November on an interlocking lives novel. The whole time it felt awful and while a friend read what I wrote post-November and told me she was really intrigued by the whole thing, I haven’t really felt the urge to go back to it.
(Actually, I just read back over my blog entries from last year, and it seems like I was having more fun than I remember. I at least liked the book-within-a-book part of the story.)
This feels…effortless, almost. The way it’s supposed to feel. I’m not concerned about the quality of the writing (which is almost certainly full of too many adjectives and circular thought patterns). I’m, dare I say it, having fun. It reminds me of when I first started writing, when it didn’t matter if things were good or made sense, as long as words got written.
Now, Nano is officially dead, and it’s been a while since I’ve been keeping up, but I know Week 1 tends to be all rainbows and honeymoon periods and what have you, and then Week Two or Three is, like, the Worst Thing Ever. But I wonder…I wonder if we’ll get there. I mean, I feel really good.
Fingers crossed that this is all smooth sailing.
But even if everything falls apart tomorrow, we’re still doing better right now than we have the rest of the year.
Life be weird, yo.
See you next week, squiders.
