I'm not here. Truly.

I know, I know, I said I was disappearing until the end of November... and yet here I am. Addicted? No way! Just enthusiastic. Yeah, that's it... enthusiastic.

I am, for those interested, nowhere near 50,000 words. I'm at about 17,000 now and with just over a week to go there's no way I'll reach the 50K goal. However, that's okay. I decided a while ago to forget the word goal and concentrate on the words themselves. That goes entirely against the spirit of NaNoWriMo but I don't care, because I've made some great discoveries. In the process of putting parts of my story together I am finding links I had never seen before. I'm developing an understanding of some things and starting to see the inherent sadness of other things. The entire process has been incredibly valuable, more than I ever anticipated, and that is worth a great deal more than the satisfaction of reaching a word goal.

The flipside of this, however, is that a whole lot of stuff is being churned up and I don't necessarily have the capacity to deal with it all at once. Of course I don't have to deal everything at the same time, but a lot of it is out there now and it's hard to unring a bell, you know? So I'm continuing to take things slowly... I'm still a hermit, I'm still minimising my online activity and I'm taking lots of breaks from writing when I think my body and mind need it. If I were listening to my counsellor I'd also be shunning junk food, eating more vegetables and doing plenty of exercise, but hey, one can't have everything. (Although... if I HAD listened to her advice about self-care then I might not have had those midnight anxiety attacks either so perhaps there's something in what she says...)

So this is where I'm at. And hey, who's sick to death of the interminable updates about Femina's mental health and counselling sessions? Yeah, me too... but like I said, this is where I'm at...
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"She's a rebel..."

"...and she never ever does what she should..."

I am officially a NaNoRebel. That's right, I've broken the rules. Happily there are a lot of us, hence the term 'NaNoRebel' rather than 'NaNoCheat'. I'm a rebel because I'm writing a memoir (albeit fictionalised) AND I'm using some previously written material. This is outside the NaNoWriMo guidelines... however, they're kind of okay with it and really just want people to write, so rebels are allowed so long as we admit that we're rebels. It's all good.

Current word count: 10,422. Still a bit behind but that's okay. And here's a tip I'll give you for nothing... a detailed description of a middle-of-the-night, off-the-scale anxiety attack is probably not something one should attempt to write at night, if one hopes to sleep at all. Apparently it's difficult to write about anxiety without feeling anxious. Huh. Well, lesson learned. It's also the only thing I've written so far that has made me cry.

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Word Count

6,240... slightly below the aim of 1,667 per day (which would put me at 6,668) but still not bad. Unfortunately the quality decreases as the word count goes up. Oh well.

Onward and upward. Writer's block, begone!
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NaNoWriMo - Day One

It doesn't bode well that I got to about 5pm on day one of National Novel Writing Month and thought, "Oh yeah... I'm meant to be writing."  As you can tell, I'm tremendously excited and couldn't wait to get started. :D

I've gone into this flying completely by the seat of my pants. I have no plans. I have no plot outline. I have no defined characters. I don't know what's going to happen or how it all ends. Ends? I'm not even sure how it starts.  Nevertheless, my word count is 1,784. You need to write 1,667 per day to make it to 50,000 by 30 November so I'm ahead. Where I'll be in a week from now, and what will be on the page, is anyone's guess... whatever you do, don't ask ME. I have no idea.

And no, I'm not uploading any of it.
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Signed away my sanity

I opened a new post to tell you all about signing away my sanity, only to discover that this is my 400th post. As my dad would say, wacky-do! (No, really. He would actually say that. In public and everything.)

This may be proof that in fact I had no sanity to sign away in the first place, but I have just signed up for NaNoWriMo. Yep, that's National Novel Writing Month, where the aim is to write a 50,000 word novel in November. That's WRITE a 50,000 word novel, not tweak a novel you've already written or finish a novel you've already started. You're supposed to start from scratch on November 1 and aim to finish by midnight (your local time) on November 30.  If you make it to 50,000 words by the deadline you can submit your novel to the website for an official word count and be declared a winner. (Everyone who finishes the word count is a winner. There are no actual prizes.)  Here's an excerpt from the website:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

So, this means I shall either abandon my blog in November, or I'll be blogging every single day as a method of writing procrastination.  Frankly, I have my doubts that I can do this and I feel sure I WILL write a lot of crap, but I don't care. I think it's going to be a hoot to give it a go... and as the website says, "Win or lose, you rock for even trying!"

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