Tuesday, December 1, 2015

I Quit NaNoWriMo

November is finally over. It's a little bittersweet for me this year. I'm happy for each NaNoWriMo participant that meets their goal. It just wasn't for me this year.

I still stand by what I said when I finally decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I knew I was not likely to finish. I tried anyways. Two weeks in, I made the decision to quit.


This past month has been a real crunch to get the upstairs apartment ready for my Mom to move in. Sweetie took off almost three weeks of work, people have been in and out constantly, and I'd been on toddler-watch without much of a break to write. Most of my writing got done late at night after everyone else had gone to bed. My sleep was suffering, and when my sleep suffers, so does my mood.

The first week was still awesome. I was meeting my daily word counts like it was nothing. Everything was going smoothly when we left on our trip to go visit my sister. I had compensated with my daily goals to account for taking a few days off for our trip and again for Thanksgiving, so I wasn't worried about that.

The thing you have to watch out for when you take a complete break like I did is the lost momentum. I tried writing on the trip back home, and only managed half the daily word count. I wasn't too worried, as I knew I could catch up easily still as long as I would sit down and do the work.

Then I got home and went through my mail. I had jury duty scheduled for the next week. That was the proverbial nail in the coffin for me. I decided to quit NaNoWriMo for this year before I became too stressed out. Sometimes when things spin out of control, it's kinder to let go of the things you can control. I've done it before, and that's what I did this time, too.

I still have all the benefits I've talked about that came with participating in NaNoWriMo. Meal planning is something I plan to continue. I got enough of the story figured out and out of my head that it's not plaguing me in quite the same way that it was. I don't regret my decision to write, and I don't regret my decision to stop.

Except I haven't really quit writing. It seems I can't. Sure, I stopped writing my fiction, but that just means I start writing in my journal more. And poems. And songs. I guess I'll just have to keep writing as long as my finger keeps itching.

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